Forums vs Facebook
 

So there is a clear decline in forum activity since facebook began. Why do you think this is? Facebook doesn't look to me like much more than a heavily mod'd forum anways.

Have you guys found anything to help bring people back to your forums?

Why? Because people have only so much time to spend online. Facebook makes it easy and also lets them connect with friends and family- everyone they know is already using it. It's not really a replacement for a forum about a specific topic or even general discussion, but it does swallow up the casual conversation. People will also trust advice/answers they get from friends and family over strangers online in many cases.

The forum experience needs to be something Facebook can't provide- a niche topic, needs to have experts in whatever the topic is, needs to be welcoming, but also have the realistic expectation it's not going to be the primary online meeting place for most of your users- even the dedicated ones.

Although I have not taken my own advice yet, integration of Facebook into a nice informative forum with interesting and useful topics is I believe the key to having a successful forum.

Mobile, mobile, mobile. That's why.

I don't want my family nor friends to know what i am up to, so i deactivated my fb account long back. So, i am just sticking with the forums that interests me.

I had not considered that but it makes sense. Now if I could get my mobile style to allow logins I may benefit from such.

I'm owning an internet marketing forum, feel good with it, Facebook, it's my second choice :)

Not only logins, but FB has the PUSH alerts that keep people participating. You don't have to go to FB, it comes to you.

How do you think is the bet way to do this. I've been looking at creating custom tabs which open up our forum inside of facebook. Not found a good one yet as they are all charging.

I found it can be done with the app for your forum but needs an https url which we currently don't have or know how to get at this point.

I did the same for so many reasons. Not just deleted, but deleted all content, image post everything 1 by one. I posted a big thing about facebook on our forum. its pretty long tho.

Your forum looks amazing!!

I started using tapatalk which does the push notification thing and its free but does have tapatalk branding and adverts everywhere :(

Yes I am yet to meet anyone on either the user side or the admin side who likes tapatalk. It's not a vBulletin solution.