Okay, okay, okay... Maybe that's a little ambitious. BUT, after recently engaging with FB again after a 2 year hiatus, I can see a real challenge of pulling users away from that platform to a wpForo setup.
I run a forum for authors and readers. It's a new forum so I'm trying to pull in members from all places. Thing is, when I got to many of those places (like FB groups) the offering for discussion and exchange of ideas is already working so well. But I still believe in the value of having a forum and community that I'm able to shape and maybe eventually monetize.
If you outright think forums are not in competition with the likes of FB then no worries. However, I'd like to use this thread to brainstorm:
- Technical solutions & ideas that could improve wpForo's capability to compete with FB.
- How we, as site admins, sell, market, operate, implement, wpForo in such a way as to present it as an alternative, companion, or competitor to FB.
Please list your thoughts and ideas below.
Well, with how big and sophisticated FB platform is, wpForo and its implementation is really not poised to compete and should not compete with FB but rather be easily integratable with the social media platform. With that thought, built-in social media sharing (to and from) feature for wpForo plugin is necessary. That way, it's going to be a win-win for both platforms. 🙂
I think that's a great point. So, technical solutions would be to have wpForo post to your Facebook (Twitter, Google+, Snapchat, Tumblr etc too) account / page / group when you post on the forum. I imagine this may draw some traffic away from Facebook if the forum post is an excerpt, what you get just posting the link, because people would have to go there to read it. If the whole item went up then people on Facebook would just comment on there.
And when posting on wpForo, users should have tick boxes below the post to choose which of their linked social accounts they want to cross post to.
One of the most important things to come with this would be the ability for wpForo to handle social media login, right in the thread. You don't want to lose potential posters because they have to go to a registration page. They should be able to type their reply and hit a button that says "login and post with Facebook".
And I hear that sometimes the social login plugins do a bad job of user account management and people end up with multiple accounts. That would have to be prevented. It should recognise your email address and sync all your logins to one account.
In terms of posting to forums from Facebook Twitter etc, that seems a little more complicated. Forums tend to be topic based but on social media people just splurge on their own timeline. Could wpForo have a timeline type forum for each user, where all their social posts go? And perhaps each user could opt to follow other users on wpForo and would then all have a page where they could see their curated digest from within the forums.
I'm aware this is moving wpForo quite a way away from being a typical forum but perhaps if this all came as an optional plugin then site managers could decide on whether to integrate it or not.
Okay, this is a great start. More ideas for the Dev team anyone?
Nice idea!
The Facebook Cross Posting feature is already in our to do list. But this is something more than a simple cross posting, this is a full synchronization of users and content. I'm going to investigate FB api and check if this is possible.
Was this implementation carried out?
I'm going to investigate FB api and check if this is possible.
I think there must be one, there are plenty of Facebook status posts on Twitter.
Yes i agree most of my members are on Skype,Facebook,WhatsApp etc in different groups, i think because each other support happen more fast in real time if i am not wrong something like Ajax post and reply.
Sounds about right. The real time nature of activity and notifications on most platforms keeps people engaged.
This has asked been mentioned before but it fails under this topic - an app for iPhone and Android that could hook into the site's forums would possibly make the user experience better and keep users engaged. Especially if it could handle push notifications.
