Is Facebook Groups the Right Platform for your Community?

Facebook Groups seems like a great option for any membership community. Facebook lets you set up private groups that you can control access to, and allows you to invite members and build a community. With over 400 million members, building your membership community on Facebook groups seems like it would give you the ultimate access to the widest possible audience. After all, everybody is already on Facebook, right?

Is Facebook the right platform for your community?

Everybody knows that Facebook groups are pretty easy to set up. And a great way to get your membership to communicate with each other. Everybody’s on Facebook right? But is Facebook really the right platform for your membership community? Let’s look at some reasons why it might not be.

Your group is not Facebook’s highest priority. Facebook makes money with eyeballs. They sell ads and they promote posts that make them money. Nothing wrong with that. But that’s not in always in the best interest of your group. Do you really want your members having to wade through ads while they’re inside you were groups community?

Who owns what?

With Facebook, you don’t own your database. Well, technically that statement is not entirely true. According to Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, you retain the copyright to the content that you upload, and you grant Facebook a license to display the content. The real issue is that you have very little control over how the content is displayed, and you have almost no control over the platform and the database.

While it’s unlikely that Facebook will make any major changes to its platform in the near future, it’s not entirely impossible. Facebook regularly makes small algorithmic changes that can affect who sees what when they login to Facebook.

And, while you might retain copyright over your content, what about your member list? The question of who owns your member list gets a little more complicated. The users belong to Facebook, so where does that leave you? Besides the possibility that they can (and have) change things without warning you, Facebook also controls your members. What would you do if a particular member was banned from Facebook? What would you do if you got banned? What if Facebook decided to take down your group? While it may be unlikely, it can happen and has happened, and there is no recourse, no phone number to call, and nobody to help you.

Does this mean you need to install and host your own community software? Not necessarily, though that may be a great choice for you, depending on your community’s needs. Cloud-based hosted community forum software like MemberMan offers many of the same advantages as Facebook groups: most notably that you don’t need to be a computer-genius system operator to keep it running. The main difference between Facebook groups and a hosted community forum is that with the latter you are a customer, but with the former, you (and your members) are their product.

Who is Facebook’s customer?

Do you remember the last time you got a bill from Facebook? Maybe it was an advertising fee. Or maybe you’ve never paid Facebook anything at all? That should give you pause right there. Why would Facebook give away something that’s so valuable to you?

The truth is that you are not Facebook’s customer; your members are. Actually that’s not entirely accurate either — your members are the product that Facebook sells to its true customers: the advertisers. How does that sit with you? Wired Magazine quotes Douglas Rushkoff saying “Ask a kid what Facebook is for and they’ll answer ‘it’s there to help me make friends’. Facebook’s boardroom isn’t talking about how to make Johnny more friends. It’s talking about how to monetise Johnnny’s social graph.” If you have any doubts about this, just try contacting Facebook’s customer service.

Facebook will also show ads on your group page. Ads for other groups and suggested pages will show up on the right-hand side of the page.

Do you have the control you need?

Facebook groups don’t give you the kind of administrative control that you need. A well tended membership community will have members with administrative privileges at various levels inside the organization who can shepherd the group, curate content and guide discussions. Facebook gives you two options: Admin or Moderator. That may be enough for some groups, but it doesn’t give you the granular control that you might want to allow certain users to moderate certain parts of your community.

Are you able to segment your group?

A private Facebook group is basically like one big open space where everyone is milling around, mingling with one another. There’s one big “wall” where all the discussions happen, and older discussions disappear down the list as new discussions are posted.

Are you able to easily bill your members on a recurring basis?

You can always use a third-party billing solution, and then add your members into your Facebook group. It sounds easy, until you realize that every month you’ll have to add all your new members by hand (and make sure they successfully join the group). You’ll also have to find users who’ve lapsed or cancelled, and remove them from the group by hand. This may not seem like much while your group is small, but it can wind up being a big administrative headache as your group grows.

So what are FB groups good for?

That’s a pretty strong case for not using Facebook Groups as your membership site platform. So should you write them off entirely? Absolutely not! There are still a few things Facebook is good at.

Growing Your Paid Community — one strategy is to set up a “community lite” Facebook group for people who are interested in your community, but not ready to commit yet. Provide some of your valuable content for these members to try, and get some of your more active members to curate the group. When these prospective members are ready to pay for membership, direct them to your paid community site and get them signed into the core community. The Membership Guys have a great podcast about this strategy with guest Jill Stanton.

Free Groups: If your group is just for fun, or if you don’t plan to monetize your community, then Facebook groups may be a great choice.

If your community is the lifeblood of your business, then you have an interest in controlling your own platform. There are plenty of community platforms available today — from open-source platforms that you can install on your own Wordpress blog to full-featured hosted platforms like MemberMan. Choose a community platform that enables you to do what you do best without fussing with software issues.

Your forum software is the lifeblood of your community. Don’t make the choice lightly.