Competing with Facebook

[PeteMarko]

So many people spend so much time on Facebook, how do we draw them into our forums?. How do we compete with the interactivity that people have on Facebook. I am always looking for widgets or anything that allows me to interact with Facebook.

I have a Facebook page that all my Wordpress posts share to, does anyone have any ideas on how to increase out interactivity with Facebook?

 

[wedgar]

So many people spend so much time on Facebook, how do we draw them into our forums?. How do we compete with the interactivity that people have on Facebook. I am always looking for widgets or anything that allows me to interact with Facebook.

I have a Facebook page that all my Wordpress posts share to, does anyone have any ideas on how to increase out interactivity with Facebook?

Having content on your forms that draw people into them. What niche of information or discussion do you have that isn't available on Facebook or as complete as you have that Facebook doesn't have.

 

[PeteMarko]

It is extremely difficult to find a niche these days, I have been developing websites since 2003 and a niche was just as important as it is now. I think its a case of finding more ways of interacting with Facebook. My FB page does that very well as any posts clicked there to bring people back to my website. But I'm looking for more ways to interact with FB. (ideas)

 

[Mendalla]

My forum (link in sig) started when members of a previous forum didn't want to go to Facebook as the owner was planning to do. We just felt that FB wasn't as good for the kinds of discussions we wanted to have. Admittedly, we haven't drawn a lot of new members since, but I can't say how much FB is to blame.

We do have an FB group but we aren't really having much interaction between the two and maybe we should. The FB is mostly for getting information out. Perhaps we should do more but I would want someone else to take that on. I am already both sysadmin and treasurer. I really don't feel like being marketing manager, too.

 

[Dan Blather]

The Facebook groups that could be considered competition to Cyburbia aren't so much discussion groups, as they are news and meme aggregators. They're a lot like early Reddit -- people post links to some article elsewhere, and comment on it. However, some Facebook groups are VERY busy, and have a lot of media buzz.

Cyburbia's real competition includes blogs, a planning news aggregator site, and Reddit. Among urban planners, blogs serve as a kind of scattered-site message board -- people post messages on their own sites, rather than a subforum on a common message board. Reddit's urban planning subreddit is a bit of an echo chamber (most posts are about urban living, "suburbs suck", transportation/transit, and projects in superstar cities), but its mindshare among younger Millennials really hurt us.

Old-fashioned email lists are an ingrained part of urban planner culture that we've had to live with since starting the message board in 1996 (!). Many planners have told me they prefer listservs to message boards because they're "more serious" and "more work-related". If a supervisor is looking over your shoulder, it's better to have Outlook open than Firefox or Chrome.

Anyhow, back to the OP - I'm working on posting the Cyburbia RSS feed to the Cyburbia Facebook group.