Xenforo - Social Media Strategy?

[RobParker]

So we continually hear how social media is killing off forums but I'm still amazed how little attempt XF makes to engage and integrate with social media.

At the minute I think the only social media integration built into the core is:

Login via Social Media account
Share this page via Social Media

That's literally it. That REALLY feels like we're missing out on some big opportunities.

Being able to automatically post content to Social Media is a the big/obvious thing that's missing (and not yet really covered by 3rd party addons either). Some forums might have several twitter accounts or belong to different Facebook Pages/groups which cover different aspects of their forums and being able to draw in users from those sources would seem to be key.

Social media is constantly evolving, facebook is "dying" with the likes of Reddit and Snapchat taking over and XF seems to be very behind the curve.

The point of this thread was to see what else people think is missing, how they utilise Social Media to attract users, what methods can be borrowed from social media to improve forums (Trending content and Ratings being the obvious two), what kind of Social Media engagement people are seeing, etc.

 

[New Joe]

Yeah, i think the more involvement with such as twitter and FB the more Xenforo could grow.
I hate both twitter and FB but it's where it is all at for the younger generation so it should be capitalized some how within the xenforo software and marketing.
Having the ability to have say certain Forum automatically publish parts of Threads on twitter and FB could be a start..

 

[Mackeral_Fillet]

I have a YouTube channel and Instagram to attract traffic to my forum.

I agree that more could be done at stock XF level. Would be good to see better widgets provided for Forum users to see Instagram and other social accounts. Also I agree the cross posting to social networks would really help.

The Share This Page is rarely used, one of my Forums has over a million posts and I barely get users share page level content.

One of the things that frustrates me about XF is a severe lack of clarity about what’s coming. Many times I’ve considered hiring a dev to do this stuff but don’t want to pay then it’s included with an update!

 

[Miri]

In a forum, you should never give in to the temptation of social interaction. It would be a total confusion of information.
XenForo is making progress, only for this excellent choice.

 

[Mackeral_Fillet]

In a forum, you should never give in to the temptation of social interaction. It would be a total confusion of information.
XenForo is making progress, only for this excellent choice.

Interested in how you generate traffic to your forum? Do you not see Social media as a benefit in any way?

 

[RobParker]

In a forum, you should never give in to the temptation of social interaction. It would be a total confusion of information.

I don't understand the logic there at all?

Everyone is tied in to SM nowadays. It's where all of your potential users are, it's where everyone is advertising. Why wouldn't you "advertise" your forum there via automatically posting things to SM?

 

[Russ]

I'd say XF needs the ability to post to twitter/facebook, posting snippets on social media to drag users to the forum seems like a great first step.

8 years in the making https://xenforo.com/community/threa...limit-for-update-your-status.3732/#post-57650

Oh my... I've been here that long.

 

[Jake B.]

8 years in the making

Have to make sure it's done right

 

[Mackeral_Fillet]

Here’s what IPB offers. The more I see what they do the more interested in IPB I become!

 

[Miri]

For me, the logic of a forum is the interaction of the contents in the forum itself.I do not consider a solid base, temporary visits of curiosity from social media. If I find 'the same' your content on facebook, then I never register on your page and do not spend even 1 second to interact in the forum, so I write it on facebook.
Change the reasoning instead for a blog, where you just want to read the content without the interaction. (in this case you would not need a forum instead)

 

[Russ]

For me, the logic of a forum is the interaction of the contents in the forum itself.I do not consider a solid base, temporary visits of curiosity from social media. If I find 'the same' your content on facebook, then I never register on your page and do not spend even 1 second to interact in the forum, so I write it on facebook.
Change the reasoning instead for a blog, where you just want to read the content without the interaction. (in this case you would not need a forum instead)

I'd say the goal for the majority of users here isn't to let users browse the same content on FB/Twitter but to drive FB/Twitter users into the forum using automatic integration. Could be as simple as the thread title and a little snippet with a "read more" being posted to a designated FB/Twitter account.

 

[RobinHood]

I agree. I know Chris worked on quite a lot of social add ons as an independent developer to tackle this problem, not sure what happened to them. I think with the fast changing scene and API updates perhaps it was a lot of maintenance.

I did make a suggest a while back relating to this to have some kind of post thread submission funnel to encourage users to share their submitted content on other platforms

https://xenforo.com/community/threa...cial-share-a-thread-after-creating-it.132370/

There are other tools you can use too, like dlvr.it to automate this kind of thing, but only the basic plan is free

 

[Diana]

I don't understand the problem. Just use share buttons to post content to social media. As it links back to your forum it will generate traffic.

 

[RobinHood]

To be fair, the share buttons are kind of hidden away on XF2. There's only the share list at the bottom of each thread and it's no longer easy to share specific posts.

Discord:



IPS:



Even VB has share links in the postbit as well as the post share link:



Facebook itself has massive share buttons on nearly every post too

 

[rdn]

Discord:

That is Discourse .

 

[upnet]

Scheduling posts to social media from the forums would be very useful. I agree the share buttons are hardly used.

 

[Miri]

@ upnet:
In your opinion, how much could your forum improve, in terms of users, these buttons, compared to the content of the site itself? Just for curiosity ..
Then, you would be more pleased, have a like by using the XENFORO button (on your site) or via FACEBOOK button.
I ask this question because I can not understand an actual benefit of these buttons.
Thank you

 

[Russ]

@ upnet:
In your opinion, how much could your forum improve, in terms of users, these buttons, compared to the content of the site itself? Just for curiosity ..
Then, you would be more pleased, have a like by using the XENFORO button (on your site) or via FACEBOOK button.
I ask this question because I can not understand an actual benefit of these buttons.
Thank you

I think upnet agrees with you, they're saying the buttons are hardly used. They're pushing for other social media integration such as promoting posts automatically to your social media.

XF1 had a share function like that on all posts, kind of forgot it was even there