It’s only about the present: Posts  on Facebook tend to have a very short life and browsing or searching past posts is not intuitive. The result is that the same questions or types of comments tend to get repeated over and over.

No reputation: Without any badges or indicator of status or experience, there is no way to determine a level of trust or the position of the poster.

Branding:  Creating a large community is hard. It’s critical to your brand that you can integrate it with the community’s identity. Otherwise, it’s just another Facebook group.

No ownership: All that data and all those posts belong to Facebook. Building a large community on Facebook requires a lot of faith.

Facebook & Forums

A forum or community can work in tandem with your Facebook group or page. Everyone is on Facebook which makes it a great place to recruit new members and to viralize content that is being created in your community.  Recruit on Facebook but give them a home on your own domain.

Vanilla Forums offers a cloud based solution that can work in conjunction with your current Facebook presence. With social sign-on, social sharing, badges and granular permissions, Vanilla Forums completes your social media strategy. Try Vanilla Forums Cloud Solution free for 30-days.