A few years ago I would have been in the camp that says facebook doesn't affect forums, but now I am witness to facebook nearly destroying one of my forums. In my specific forum demographic members would rather use facebook purely from a convenience standpoint. It's really amazing. I can't believe what I am seeing. They don't care about privacy or that my forum offers more. To them FB is easier.

HEre in Portugal, Facebook is literally killing internet forums... :down:

Internet Brands' vBulletin division presented an interesting graph on this topic at last year's ForumCon conference. See slide 4 of this presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/VigLink/ig...ion-forum-maus

For our business we recently ran an analysis of over 50,000 vBulletin sites and found that over 50% of the sites had increasing traffic rank.

We see lots of sites using Facebook to complement thieir vBulletin-powered forum in successful ways. One site leaping to mind is NSXPrime:
NSXPrime | NSXPrime Facebook page

Social media is really killing the impact of forums now a days.... its better to connect forums via social media tools to have a equally importance as of social media

It would be great to hear some more opinions about this matter, now that Facebook Groups are getting so popular...

I maintain my opinion stated last May: Facebook is killing Internet Forums. :(

I used to get 1200 posts per day. Now 1 every few days. All the small talk went over to facebook which people used to do on my site. They also like to be able to delete posts that dont agree with them, where on my site, if people disagreed with you, you'd be trolled. Theres a reason Facebook doesnt have an 'unlike' button and allows you to delete posts on your wall and ban people. People like that power.

IMO, forums can easily co-exist with Facebook. Obviously, you have to adapt to the changing environment.

Let say you received a ton of page views from people having casual conversations on your forum. Well there are much better mediums for people to have casual conversations. In most cases, you can't expect to offer someone an inferior service and gain traction. Rest assured that quality sites see the reverse effect; they gain traffic from FaceBook.

Think, what does your site offer people? You should have several advantages over FaceBook; Quality content, articles, in-depth analysis, custom coded features, etc. There are several things that you can offer that are dedicated to your specific niche that FaceBook can't.

Some like the more enclosed community while others are exhibitionists showing themselves to total strangers. I haven't really like FB since I opened an account there over 2 years ago. I used it on my anime website and all I got was bots and no new members. I dropped it off my forum and have not gone back to FB. Only thing that will take me back now is to close the account.

No, facebook can not kill forums if you are doing well with your forum, visitors will come. I am owning a forum and it's enlarging day by day.

Hard work always pays, so work hard to get your forum up and on track :)