Stop using Facebook for your online communities

There are a ton of options for building your community membership site, but it’s hard to find professionalism and usability in the same package. Customers expect every community forum to be as user-friendly as Facebook, but Facebook can make you look like a bit of an amateur. You could build something yourself on Wordpress but not without a significant investment of time and money.

Enter: Slack. When paired with SlackPass, managing your community site on Slack becomes a breeze. It’s easy to use for your members and it provides you with control over their experience. That means a sign up page with your branding, an ad-free platform that you can make your own and less distraction so your community can focus on learning, collaborating and growing.

Usability: Slack Leverages the Language of Other Community Services

People already intuitively understand how to use the major social media sites. They get how 1-to-1 messaging, community forums, and comment threads work. If you build your own membership site on Wordpress,you have to build in this design language with a thousand plugins yourself. Until now, though, that’s what you’d have to do in order to gain complete ownership over your community site.

Slack has already done the work of building an independent forum and messaging system outside the world of social media sites. Even if your users have never encountered Slack before, they’ll quickly and intuitively understand how to use it from Slack’s excellent onboarding and feature discoverability. This means you get to spend your time providing compelling content for your community instead of teaching them how it works.

Ownership: You Don’t Want to Be Stuck in Facebook’s Business Model

It’s time for some real-talk about why you absolutely do not want to use major social media platforms to run your community. Traditional social media is great for reaching large audiences, but fails to provide the deeper conversations and collaboration your community wants. Facebook’s (and the other big sites’) interests are directly at odds with your own. They offer a free service and need to get you to pay for advertising in order to make money. You want to offer a high-value membership to your clients without force-feeding them irrelevant ads.

Instead, you can use Slack to build your brand without getting mired in the muck and din of social media. Fake news is not the only damaging content that spreads like wildfire on social media; so do low-quality products and disreputable companies, not to mention the trolls. Having your name alongside a lot of these services can be harmful to your brand.

Monetization: Community > Transactional Purchases

There are dozens of platforms where small business owners can reach an ever-broadening marketplace. Services like Etsy, Skillshare, Patreon, Minted and others might seem like an easier way to build sales than nurturing your community. The problem is, on these sites the marketplace’s brand is what’s front and center. As the maker, you are just providing a transactional service.

These services may be a good way to find new customers, but once customers have completed their first purchase, are they going to remember you? Will they be able to recommend you by name or just mention “Skillshare” when someone asks them how they learned that new coding skill?

Building community creates depth instead of breadth. You can turn your buyers into brand advocates who will provide (free!) word-of-mouth marketing. Beyond that, with Slack and SlackPass you can charge members for entry into this community. While people would balk at the idea of paying for a Facebook group, paying for access to this separate and private network on Slack can feel valuable and exclusive.

Not only can SlackPass help you create free, open Slack communities along with paid membership communities, it gives you the ability to also create hybrid groups. Create a free community that anyone can join, then add private, paid channels easily from the SlackPass admin panel where you provide your premium content.

Knowing the power and flexibility of Slack, which platform would you use for your membership community?

Ready to start using Slack? Check us out at SlackPass!