[IPS News] Why owning your own community is better than using a Facebook Group

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Are you a member of a busy Facebook Group? Do you find it overwhelming trying to sort through all the posts to find something posted the day before? Are you now missing new posts and only seeing them a few days later?

Facebook Groups are tempting to use as they are free to set up but is this the best decision for the future of your business?

At the beginning with just a handful of members, things may fun fine. But fast forward to where your group becomes busy with thousands of members posting and reading.

Your group becomes overwhelming. You find it hard to locate posts made on previous days and search is of no use. It is getting harder to keep on top of troublesome and spamming members.

Worse still, Facebook's changing algorithms mean that your members are not seeing every post you make. You do as Facebook asks and link your page to your group to find that you must now boost posts to reach your members.

This is getting to be a very common scenario.

Even more worrying are rumours that Facebook is bringing advertising to groups. Will this allow your competitors to target your hard won membership?

Will Facebook roll out the "Discover" tab across all continents? This alone has destroyed organic reach for many brands.

What would you do if Facebook blocked your account for a week? Would your sales suffer?

There is a way to take back control of your membership and secure your business' future. Building your business on your own land is a powerful way of retaining complete control over your community regardless of what happens to Facebook longer term.

Created in 2002,  Invision Community has always adapted to the changing habits of the internet. Our latest product is clean, modern, mobile ready and equipped to integrate with social media. It can power your conversations, website and shopping cart. It features single click Facebook sign in and tools to promote scheduled content to your Facebook page.

We recently wrote why you shouldn't settle for a Facebook Group when building a community.

The benefits of an owned Invision Community are:

• You own your own data. Your data is not mined for Facebook's benefit.
• Make it yours by branding it your way
• You're no longer boxed in by the Facebook format
• Seamless integration to your shopping cart for more monetization opportunities
• Set up permission levels to better control what your members can see

Lets dig in a look at some of the tools you can leverage to make the migration easier.

Mobile Ready
Invision Community works great on your mobile. It resizes the page perfectly to match whichever device you are using. You don't need to install special apps or mess with themes. It just works out of the box.

 

Facebook Sign In
The first thing you'll want to do is turn on Facebook Sign In. This adds the familiar Facebook button right on the sign in page and register form. Clicking this logs them into your new community with their Facebook account. It even imports their profile photo so they are familiar with other members.

 

Make use of embeds
A great way to keep incorporating content from your Facebook Group or Page is to use embeds. Post a link to your content on Facebook and it transforms into a rich media snippet.

 

Social Promotions
Share your community content with your Facebook Page. Click the "Promote" button on any content item and you can customize the text and images shared. The promotion system offers a full scheduling system much like Buffer or Hootsuite. This is all built in at no extra cost.

 

Find Your Content
Unlike a Facebook Group, your Invision Community makes it easy to find older content. A powerful feature is activity streams. These are customizable "feeds" much like the Facebook News Feed but completely editable to you and your members needs. You can even make this the first page your members see for easy content discovery.

 

Use Clubs
Clubs allow sub-communities to run inside your main community. Let's look at a real world example.
A FitPro has several different fitness products for sale. Each product is a Facebook Group. She posts daily workouts and answers member's questions.
Using many groups can be very time consuming to manage.
Clubs puts these sub-communities right on the page making it easy to drop in and update.
These Clubs can be private and members invited to join allowing full privacy. This is like a closed Facebook group.

 

We're only scratching the surface of what Invision Community can offer you. You can take back control of your membership and be free from the fear that Facebook will change something that will impact your sales.

We're experts in this field with 16 years of experience. We've helped grow thousands of communities from the very biggest brands to the smallest of niches.

We'd love to talk to you about your needs.

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