Last week I spoke at the eVirus conference in Vilnius, Lithuania. The dominant theme was Facebook. Namely, how can we build a community on Facebook?
My answer is pretty simple.
Don’t build a community on Facebook.
Do you want to base your community efforts upon a platform over which you have no control, which has one of the lowest response rates in history, where most of your updates wont been seen by the majority of your audience, where few individuals meaningfully interact with each other on branded pages, with little demonstrable ROI, and where the owner can shift the ground beneath your feet at any moment without warning?
Sure, Facebook has some uses. You can build an audience pretty quickly. However, it’s almost impossible to get this audience to meaningfully interact with each other on the platform. As a community platform, Facebook lies somewhere between awful and redundant.
Just ask yourself, how many times do you visit and interact with others on a branded Facebook page? I suspect it’s not often.
Facebook might be the easiest and most popular option, but it’s far from the best option.
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