About a week ago, Facebook deleted my profile, along with 11 years of content, coaching, livestreams, and personal posts. Yes, I did get it back, but I decided to not let this lesson pass me by without taking action on the cold hard truth that Facebook doesn’t care about you or your community, and will delete it in an instant.

And…to be honest, about a year and a half ago, Facebook deleted BOTH of my paid groups, without warning. They brought them back eventually, but not before I’d setup backup groups, and tried moving all me people.

Enough right?

Facebook is free rented land, which means, I am at the mercy of their whims, algorithms, and punishment. So after scouring the Internet for a place to move my community, I found Mighty Networks….

And I’d like to take a few minutes to explain why I chose to move my paid groups off of Facebook and into a new-ish web app like Mighty Networks.

Notification OVERLOAD

It’s been years since I’ve been able to use the notifications tab on Facebook. I think it was a combination of growing visibility coupled with the weird way that Facebook now chooses to show some notifications and not others. It’s almost like their’s now a notification algorithm. No thank you.

I’ve been missing tons of posts because I can’t possibly wade through them all. And if I’m being fair, it’s more important that I answer tags from paid customers than free followers, but Facebook doesn’t differentiate.

Over on Mighty Networks, I just have to worry about my paid customers, so I can go through each notification to check and see what’s important and not to be missed.

I’m Tired of Algorithms

The newsfeed on Facebook is not under my control. It’s also not chronological. The same goes for inside my groups. It’s maddening. I miss questions that don’t get any love or reply because Facebook shoves them down the feed thinking they aren’t relevant. NO YOU DOPE, it is relevant if a paid customer has asked a question and can’t get an answer.

On Mighty Networks, everything is simply chronological, so if I’m offline for a few hours and want to catch up, I just scroll from top to bottom to catch up.

Private Messages Are A Disaster On Facebook

The private message feature is so handy in Mighty Networks – both for individual communication, as well as one big group chat. It’s like the best of Slack and PM, without all the buzzing ridiculous notifications and requests. I’ve now started communicating with some of my higher end clients in chat, and it’s really convenient when I’m in the app and responding to questions.

It Was The Best Forum/Community Platform I Could Find

There were a lot of choices. And all of them were pretty lame and web 1.0 looking. Mighty Networks was the first one I found that seemed to understand how to combine the features of Facebook that we all love so much with the needs of a group community. Here are some of the things I love about it:

1. Facebook style newsfeed with nesting comments and replies. You can tag, add links, video, photos, polls, and more.
2. Private and full group community chat for easy conversation and questions that don’t require a full on post.
3. Each post has it’s own unique permalink.
4. Events export out to Google calendar, have RSVP buttons, and link out to upcoming online or offline events.
5. Mighty Networks has topics. This means you can identify your post by a topic, and then go into that topic and follow it, or view a newsfeed with just that topic in mind.
6. Private paid groups within the main group. This is an amazing feature. It means that there’s virtually groups inside of groups if you wish. So my Digital Insiders are nestled in the larger group but locked away in their own space.
7. Mobile app! When you download the Mighty Networks app, your customers can easily toggle between different communities they are a part of that are all on Mighty Networks.
8. Members can easily spot people who live near them with the “nearest you” filter.
9. You can follow individual people if you want to make sure not to miss their activity.
10. It has the ability to build courses right inside the group area – so for people who want to keep it all in house (without the threat of FB deleting it), they can!

 

 

There are also a ton of management features that make communicating with your group a lot easier than on a social media site.

With my paid communities off of Facebook, it means I can turn Facebook off MORE. It means I can leave my web browser open with my community and not be endlessly tempted to fall into the black hole of social media.

The two hardest things about moving my membership away from Facebook?

1. Training people to not look for me on Facebook
2. No livestreaming

I think livestreaming is something that the developers will (I hope) make a huge priority, since it’s so embedded in our habits now. The way I’ve gotten around it is simply scheduling Zoom events (you can do the same with YouTube live events) right into the posts and having people RSVP and then join.

You can also embed an active FB livestream into the app as well, you just have to be going live from somewhere (which isn’t practical for me since I wouldn’t want to go live on my profile for the sake of my paid group).

Teaching people to move has been tough. 

I have about 1100 people to move. So far, I’ve got about half of them moved. In order to really make sure it all sticks, I turned off posting capability in my paid Facebook groups and then committed to answering WAY more questions on Mighty than I would just on Facebook.

Tutorials help. Reminders help. Special activity just on MN helps.

Patience helps too.

It can be done, and ultimately, it’s a good move – even if it’s painful at first.

As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you – fool me twice, shame on me.”

I couldn’t continue to put my most valuable assets – my customers and my content – on a platform that has shown, not once, but twice, that it will annihilate me at will – even if I’ve committed no offense.

I expect to see more and more people moving off of Facebook in the coming months. Facebook is unable to attract younger customers – which is a HUGE issue (I know they are with IG). And I’m not the only influencer this has happened to.

If you have a paid community, or are thinking about one – I would strongly consider you take a look at Mighty Networks!