Twitter is a great place to find opinions on business and marketing tools that work and those that may be out of favour.
Obviously it does depend on the user case but reading tweet based opinions can be very informative.
Here is Sam Parr, CEO of The Hustle’s thoughts on whether Slack is a good fit for first time community builders.
First-time community builders often turn to Slack as their community platform of choice.
— Sam Parr ⚪️ (@theSamParr) January 13, 2021
But in most cases, Slack is the WORST platform for a community.
The worst.
As is usual with Twitter people are not slow to come through with their thoughts on a subject, so what solutions do people think are the best options for building communities?
Sam believes Facebook is the go to tool for this, but opinion is divided not on the functionality but the privacy issues and the fact that you have very little control over your data.
@Evanhynes_ summarises his issues with Facebook well in his response –
Facebook is one of the worst. Why:
— Ev Hynes • Climatebase.org (@evanhynes_) January 14, 2021
👎 You don't actually own your community.
👎 Can't be integrated into any stack.
👎 Not white-labelable at all.
👎 Bad association (Facebook)
👎 Impossible to migrate from Facebook to anything
The list goes on.
The future is decentralized.
So what other tools get a mention as being an option?
Discord gets a few mentions but if seems that it also suffers from the same Facebook issues highlighted by @Evanhynes_ above.
Brandable solutions include Circle (@CircleApp) and Might Networks (@MightyNetworks) were mentioned, but again you don’t own the data as it is still hosted by a third party.
We will be looking a these applications separately in the future.
To totally own your data you would need to look at WordPress plugins (if you use a WordPress website) such as Ultimate Member, PeepSo or BuddyPress.
Other research sources
https://www.g2.com/categories/online-community-management
https://www.trustradius.com/community-platforms
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