If you’re looking into Facebook Group alternatives, you’re not alone. More and more people are choosing to move away from relying on Facebook Groups to grow their community.
Whether your community group is for people switching to a vegan diet, motivating people to up their fitness game, or a space to grow a mastermind for an online course, there’s no denying the incredible power and value of community.
Creators, Interest groups, Networking enthusiasts, and marketplaces continue to run and manage their communities on Facebook Groups. But only a Facebook Group owner knows the real effort it takes to keep the community alive. A community that they don’t even own and control; a community whose reach is throttled by Facebook, a tool that is non-customizable and chaotic.
But the good news is that most people—including your members!—are open to Facebook Group alternatives like never before.
Here are some great reasons to explore alternatives to Facebook Groups today:
Let’s start here. For any post in a Facebook group, you only reach between 1%-5% of your members or followers. That should bug you as a creator. People join your group to get the benefit of it, and you can’t even reach them–even if you’re the admin.
Even when your members do see an update from your group, it’s competing with a sea of cat videos, political rants, and their grandma’s pictures of her birds. Oh, plus there’s the 15 other free Facebook groups your members probably joined that they never visit.
If you’ve got a program or membership that’s bringing people together to master something interesting or important, this isn’t going to happen. The best Facebook Group alternatives let you engage and reach your members with your amazing content, and actually TELLS them once it’s up..
So you want to build a community. What if you want to earn some income for your time and effort? What if you want to teach a course to your members?
Unfortunately, Facebook Groups doesn’t have a lot of options for monetization. So if you’re thinking about using a Facebook Group to run a paid membership site or sell online courses, you can’t.
Facebook is great at asking you the creator to spend money on advertising, but when it comes to getting paid for your hard work, they don’t have much to offer..
And the good news? People are willing to pay for a space that helps them transform their lives or master something interesting. But Facebook doesn’t let you do this.
The best alternatives to Facebook Groups will provide you with more control, features, and ways to monetize your business. When you choose an online community building platform you’ll be able to choose how you make money and create recurring revenue streams for your content.
Facebook groups are easy to set up. But at the end of the day, one of the reasons they’re so easy is that your group will ALWAYS look like Facebook’s brand.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a company, a creator, or just a passionate Host who wants to bring people together, you won’t be building your own brand on Facebook. You’ll be building theirs.
The best alternatives to Facebook Groups give you a beautiful framework to build off of and make the community space your own.
Oh, and that whole bit about how easy Facebook Groups are to launch? The same is true about the private network you can create on an online community platform.
Online courses are a fantastic way to help grow your audience and your brand. You can use them to scale your impact and even earn money!
Facebook Groups has no options for creating and hosting online courses. But some of the alternatives to Facebook Groups do! That makes it a HUGE plus for you as a host, because whether you’re thinking about it now or you’d like to have the option in the future, it’s great to have a platform that lets you sell courses too!
A big group is powerful, but let’s be honest. Sometimes the real magic happens in the smaller conversations. That’s often where deep connections are formed.
Facebook Groups doesn’t let you do this either. But some of the alternatives do! For example, if you wanted to host a paid “mastermind” group for different members of your existing group, Facebook wouldn’t work. But some of these would!
When you build on a platform you don’t control, you’re always at the mercy of others. Some digital marketers call this “digital sharecropping.”
If you choose to build a community using a Facebook Group you’re giving all the power to Facebook. Think of it this way, with a Facebook Group your community will always be governed by what Facebook deems appropriate, and they can shut you down any time they want
Facebook Groups was built desktop-first and mobile-second. In 2021, 68.1% of website clicks came from mobile phones. In a world that is mobile-first, an alternative to Facebook Groups would be a community app that is built mobile-first ground up.
Facebook is a distracting place. There’s notifications from multiple groups, business pages sharing their latest product updates, friends and family members sharing selfies or photos of food, pets and holidays, people ranting about the latest news headlines and ads about everything we should be buying being shoved down our throats at any given opportunity.
We’re bombarded with a huge volume of information on our Newsfeeds on a continuous basis – not only is this absolutely mental for our sense of sanity – it’s also an absolute nightmare for entrepreneurs, creators and businesses whose goal is to build an engaged and loyal community.
If we’re being distracted, imagine how much your audience is being distracted! Not only is your audience being distracted by the same things you are, they’re also getting messages from your competitors who are trying to win their attention or from Facebook suggesting more ‘related groups’ they can join.
Like we said above, the traffic on your Facebook page is an avalanche of things competing for your attention, mixed in with the maximum amount of ads they can possibly show you before you get fed up and go somewhere else (seriously). It’s not a place you’ll be able to effectively win the attention and engagement of your members.
No matter how good your content is, there’s just too much noise.
A platform that solves each of the problems mentioned above is an ideal solution to a Facebook Group Alternative.
100% Community Ownership : An app where your content, link, events, etc reach 100% of your audience/group members.
Here are a few apps that offer this : WhatsApp, Telegram, Scenes by Avalon, Discord and Slack.
Fully customizable : A community app that lets you choose the kind of community you want to create. Let’s you add unlimited channel types with all kinds of functionalities like forums, live audio/video, role-creation, monetization options and more.
Here are a few apps that offer this : Scenes by Avalon, Discord and Slack.
Built Mobile-First : An app built for 2021 is always mobile-first. If your community is run on an app that is not made mobile-friendly, you lost out on the growth and retention of your community.
Here are a few apps that offer this : WhatsApp, Telegram, Scenes by Avalon
You Have Complete Control : If content is king, community is the kingdom. What’s the point of putting out content if you don’t have complete control and ownership over your audience/group? You need a Facebook Group alternative where your kingdom is truly yours.
Here are a few apps that offer this : WhatsApp, Telegram, Pensil, Discord, Slack.
If you notice more carefully, Pensil is the one app that solves all the problems that a Facebook Group Owner encounters. Let’s take a quick comparison between these platforms in a more detailed way.
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