Is it a good idea to have social group for online forum?

I think title says it all. If I manage an online community in the form of a forum, is it advisable to have a social group (FB/GPlus/LinkedIn etc.) for the forum? It sounds little bit odd with fair bit of irony to create another group to promote a community, isn't it? On one side, people might start using the group instead of the forum, on the other hand, it might reach a wider audience where we can promote the forum.

Any thought?

abdfahim said:

On one side, people might start using the group instead of the forum, on the other hand, it might reach a wider audience where we can promote the forum.

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That is my experience, it can work both for you and against. In one case the forum stagnated as everyone went to Facebook, while other forums seemed to gain a few active members. Not very helpful I know but I don't think there's a definitive answer to give.

Absolutely yes. Your audience is on these platforms; it's counter-productive to ignore them. However, the goal should always be to drive traffic back to your site by linking to news and interesting discussions by summarizing and contextualizing them with a link for more info.

zappaDPJ said:

That is my experience, it can work both for you and against. In one case the forum stagnated as everyone went to Facebook, while other forums seemed to gain a few active members. Not very helpful I know but I don't think there's a definitive answer to give.

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Ya, I also thought so. I have created an experimental group in FB, not really sure if it is helping or not.

BeyBrad said:

Absolutely yes. Your audience is on these platforms; it's counter-productive to ignore them. However, the goal should always be to drive traffic back to your site by linking to news and interesting discussions by summarizing and contextualizing them with a link for more info.

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Yes, I am trying to do so. I also put a pinned post asking to join the community as well. Not sure in which direction that is going .

Another question .. should I give/share the links to the social group in my forum page, or it should only works one way, e.g. give forum links in the social group, NOT the vice versa?

I have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, both of which refer people back to my site which is a news and discussion site.

I would love to get rid of the social media accounts, but the sad fact is it's necessary as someone else said, that's what people are using. The trick is to find what gets them coming back or keeps them after they follow that initial link. I'm still working on that, but have found a new online police blotter thread has been getting a lot of attention since I started it last night.

abdfahim said:

Another question .. should I give/share the links to the social group in my forum page, or it should only works one way, e.g. give forum links in the social group, NOT the vice versa?

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Have that information flowing both ways from both platforms. Making your site users aware of your Facebook page will help increase likes and awareness on social media, which in turn will help increase site traffic.

I share links from my site and other sites on our FB page. I mix it up so it's not the same old nonsense. It keeps people active. The traffic is pretty good quality. I struggle on Twitter though. Much harder to get followers there, for me at least.

I also run an ad on my page to get users TO my FB page. I cross promote them back and forth. No matter what they spend more time on, the site or the FB page, they're now aware of both and the traffic continues to grow.

If you use FB, then it's a good idea to enable the FB login, that way you can grab some easy members when they visit your link. Also, make sure any link you share on Facebook has an image that's at least 400 pixels wide so you get the big preview which generates a lot more clicks than the small ones.

Unfortunately, if you use Xenforo, then you're partially screwed because for some reason, XF links shared on FB come out messed up. When you share a post with a picture, instead of the picture showing, you just get the default logo.og image (if you're lucky) and the picture (even if you have 50 pics) won't show.

You'll get unattractive [ attach ] or [ media ] text instead.

Well...no one's clicking on that, so now you have to manually fix what should already work.

If you share a WordPress link, or almost any other link from another CMS, then you get a nice attractive and highly clickable link.

Really wish XF would get a little more modern and adapt to the things outside of their script.

If we're going to keep forums alive, then we need to play well with others.

Twitter is slowly dying, so don't blame yourself too much for struggling to get followers there.

BeyBrad said:

Twitter is slowly dying, so don't blame yourself too much for struggling to get followers there.

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Even getting retweeted or followed by verified people hasn't helped gain followers. Maybe a few heart likes, but that's about it.

Funny thing - I bought about 20k followers and it lasted for like three days before they caught on.

Twitter removed them all. Was terrible quality anyway, mostly "egg" accounts, but was cool to see the number hop up momentarily for the whopping price of like $7.

100% do not suggest it, because it will be noticed and removed but it was funny to try it since my Twitter is virtually pointless anyway.

People are also up in arms with that Jack guy and his political policing. I've seen quite a few complaints thrown his way and a handful of users moved to some Twitter like clone (forget the name).

Sure, having social group will improve your traffic, but you must indicate your forum in each post and drive the traffic to your forum.