Why We Moved From Facebook Groups To Mighty Networks

I’ve run membership sites for almost 14 years, in that time I’ve progressed from vBulletin based sites to Facebook Groups and now to Mighty Networks and I can say that for a paid group or a busy free group a Facebook Group is the worst possible choice.

Layout

First of all let’s consider the layout, on the right hand side you have Facebook showing your members an array of groups they may like to join.

I’ve had members apply to our free groups who are members of 500+ groups already, they aren’t going see many of your posts.

These groups are taking your members away from your “message” and your community you are spending time and effort to build.

On the left hand side you have a display of groups they are already member of once again these distract from your content.

Not only that but valuable posts that scroll down can be lost and out of site in hours never to be seen again.

Reach

Let’s be honest here even in groups reach sucks, I’ve seen posts in groups of around 200 reach 6 people.

What’s worse is that that was a paid group.

People paying for content and not seeing it is a business killer.

Sure you can select to be notified of all posts but in reality they still get lost among all the cat videos and ads in your news feed.

Stupid Facebook Decisions

The recent change that allows facebook pages to join groups is short sighted at the worst it’s a spammers charter.

A group owner spends months or years building up a valuable resource and immediately a rival can join showing their page and start to siphon off members.

Not good.

I’ll not even touch on random bans and being unable to reach Facebook support.

Just remember if you build you business somewhere you should be able to reach support in a few hours if things go wrong

Search Function

The Facebook group search function sucks, it’s horrible and it rarely finds what you are looking for.

Urghhhhh the less said the better.

The Move

So we decided to move all our free and paid groups away from Facebook as soon as we could find something better.

We tested Slack which really wasn’t ideal, it’s great for fellow workmates working on a project my for a variety of people it can suffer some of the same issues that facebook does.

Next we tried Discord .. well we would have done if I could work out their pricing model and how to set up a discord group .. I gave up after 30 minutes of searching.

Finally I came across Mighty Networks

It was like a breath of fresh air.

I can only liken it to a cross between a great Blog and a good Forum.

In discovery mode posts are easy to find, looked good and were a joy to write (just like creating a Medium post)

There are NO distractions and nothing to steal your members attention

The home feed allows people to quickly scan the latest posts, and search for articles they might be interested in.

With multiple options for displaying your feed you need never miss a post or piece of content again.

As a result we’ve gone for quick 5 or 6 line posts that link elsewhere to creating long form content that has all the information in one place.

Best of all the members unanimously love it.

Let’s be honest here, Member satisfaction is what it comes down to in the end.

The Icing On The Cake

Flexibility!

We can create multiple groups that cater for specific members interests, so members who do e-commerce don’t have to sit through 10 posts on email marketing of blogging if they don’t want to .

We can use these sub groups for specific masterminds both paid and free and we can tie those in with live events from within Mighty Networks .

On top of that we can host courses and restrict access to paying members on some of them and allow access to all our members on others.

Did I mention it’s got a dedicated android and ios app?

Ohhh and analytics.. as a data nerd analytics are like gold dust, and MN’s analytics are excellent.

Cons of Moving

Not everything is going to be easy if you plan to move, you’ll have members that won’t move. You’ll probably lose a significant amount.

My view on this is a pragmatic one.

90% of the members who engage regularly and make the most of our groups have moved already.

The ones that don’t move are probably not going to be missed.

I consider it cutting out the dead wood, we are no longer talking to people with no interest, our audience has been reduced but they are now the top 20% or 30% of our members.

In fact in the last few weeks we’ve published more because it so easy and we’ve had more engagement because it’s easy to engage and view the content.

All we seem to he lost is some lurkers and people who really weren’t that interested in the groups to start with.

In the past week we’ve had over 200 members come over and 5 minutes ago i’ve just welcomed another 21.

There is a bit of a learning curve but after a few days it will feel like home to most members.

TIP: If you are struggling to get members to move across give them a bonus or some epic content that’s only available in your mighty network.

Recommendation

If you have a free or paid Facebook group seriously consider moving. I honestly feel that by moving we’ve strengthened our business, provided a far more “healthy” environment for our members and that will lead to a far more growth over the coming years.