Discord vs Facebook Groups: Which is best for a community?

in this video i'm going to be talking about discord as it compares to facebook groups as a place to host online communities now you may be a member of lots of facebook groups and uh wonder what all the fuss is about discord because there is a growing number of people that are moving their communities from facebook to discord and indeed other platforms as well but what is it that is driving that and why is it that uh some people are feeling that their uh their communities could be hosted on better platforms than uh facebook groups well you may have encountered some of the the potential issues with facebook groups um or on the other hand you may have just sort of been going along with it thinking that that is the way that things should be and need to be without realizing that there is another alternative i myself have been in countless facebook groups i literally don't know how many i'm in i haven't counted them up but i am a member of a lot of them and that is uh possibly one of the reasons why so many people do use facebook as their sort of first idea when they think about right well we've got a collection you know a group of people that we want to bring together and have a sort of collective online um then where should we do that well everyone's on facebook um everyone knows how facebook groups work so let's all come together and create a facebook group um it's great it's possibly arguably a little bit lazy as well because it's not necessarily the best place for it and so i'm just coming out with my uh my cards on the table here that i'm i'm not a huge fan now that i've seen that there is another way to do these sorts of things so i will be talking about discord from the point of view of specifically uh let me just get this straight why i think it is better than facebook to host your community the top thing about this is we've talked about facebook being you know it's ubiquitous everybody's on facebook but one of the things about facebook is it does have this endless scroll the aim of facebook is to keep you on facebook uh so that they can obviously serve you ads and things like that but they just want to keep you on that platform and i know that that's the same for lots of other things it's the same for youtube you know we want as youtubers we want you know people to continue to watch our videos youtube wants to keep people on youtube as well for exactly the same reasons so i'm not disputing that for one minute um but when it comes to a community space that's not necessarily the kind of uh uh driving force that we want to be actually you know driving the interactions that we're having in the the community space that we're trying to create um so facebook are basically applying that same sort of scrolling idea to all of the conversations that are going on in your community in your facebook group and that's just simply not natural is it it's not natural to just come in and listen to you know who's talking the loudest or the people that are having a conversation right at the front and ignoring everything that's happened you know maybe yesterday depending on how big the group was the conversations from yesterday can easily get lost and if you just don't scroll down enough you're not going to see all of that great information so it's not got a great deal of sort of discoverability apart from what's the latest thing that people are talking about um that also brings me on to then the sort of general organization it is just a stream of uh of posts of things like that and again in no particular order it's not in total date order either because you might end up with a post that was uh three years ago somebody's just chimed in with their opinion or comment on it and then that one comes rising to the top of the list as well it's just not not the best way to organize things in my mind because there is no organization there then it comes to the idea of search and finding things technically yes we do have a search function in facebook but i don't know about you i've never really found it that great depending on the group you're in you know if you've only got a few posts or it's not a very active group or something the mileage may vary on this but whenever i've tried to find stuff in the sort of popular groups that i am a member of um it's been quite tricky to find what i'm looking for if i've tried to search for it and often i'll see a post and then i'll think you know later on uh maybe a few days later or something maybe someone asked me about it i think oh there was definitely a post about that in that group i'll do a quick search no luck can't find it i'll try maybe to scroll again depending on how uh how active the group is you could be scrolling for a long time totally miss the uh the post or not be able to find it again it's reliant on actually seeing it uh and so it's a little bit tricky sometimes it's a post that i might have commented on or someone commented on you know on my behalf mentioned me in it or something like that and then it's a case of going through my facebook notifications and trying to uh trying to find uh the one from my notification history again more scrolling to try to get to it this is another sort of thing about it as well because people are on facebook for lots of other things and because it is just intended to you know keep people scrolling uh you really don't have the focus when people go to facebook and i'm speaking from personal experience here if i think right i'm going to go and check out you know the ecam live group for example i might go to facebook uh to go to the ecam live group but straight away i'm presented with things that uh you know facebook has engaged that i probably want to have a look at so you know this is straight away before i've even got to the point of going into the group it's already trying to catch me with this scrolling content and things like that and the same for if i go to notifications trying to find any notifications relative to the group it's just one big pot basically where i'm getting all of the notifications together and so there is no sort of focus so it does lack this sort of focus by contrast let's just come and have a look at a an example of a server and a fine example of a server not the best one i should imagine should say but uh still a good first attempt would be my server so that is it take one tech dot io discord so obviously there's a bit of conditioning going on here i'm trying to explain to you why i think that this is a good place to grow my online community but if i come over to my discord server uh the thing that is different and by the way i've done a video all about sort of the way that you can organize things in terms of uh the server is just the another name for my community my home my place that i'm inviting you into uh so don't be put off by the word server by the way it's uh it's just the place to host your community so consider it the equivalent of the group part of facebook group so this is just my little group and then you've got different ways to organize things so um already we've got something that is lacking in facebook which is that we do have all of these different uh sort of groupings of the conversations that people can have so uh the thing about my my particular channel so do having a discord server for my channel makes a lot more sense than a facebook group because the other thing about facebook group is you might want to have different topics and things like that that are covered and certainly on my channel i mean i've covered all sorts of things like mac automation i'm talking about discord right now obviously but i've also talked about stream deck and ecam live together and separately on a number of occasions like over 100 plus videos on just those two things um but then i talk about other things like you know for example set app so people are finding my content uh for different reasons and with setup i've got a whole series of videos that are just on the set app apps so there may be people who watch my videos who subscribe who may be really only interested in that maybe they don't use ecom live they don't use stream deck and they're just interested in the setup stuff or maybe just the automation stuff well if we were in a facebook group with everyone all sort of thrown into the mix together then people would be coming to that feed in that group and some of it would just seem like well i'm not really interested in any of this whereas with discord we can be very uh intentional about the groupings of things so for example if i scroll down here uh the channel obviously take one tech so lots of tech talk basically uh but it is now split up into yeah all the people who like my ecam live videos then we've got a section there to talk about ecam live stuff and the people who like stream deck that is there for them too productivity i do talk about youtube analytics and monetization and stuff like that more so in my live streams my weekly updates that i do um so that is a place to talk about that obviously just started producing my courses so ecamm live masterclass for one that is something that i'm doing on kajabi so we're doing more content around that so the point is we've got this organizational structure here that is just completely lacking in uh in facebook so that is a great uh a great reason to uh to consider something like discord because you can then go into these conversations and what you'll also notice is uh there is nothing uh sort of jumping out at me trying to distract me if i am a you know somebody who's coming into here wanting to learn about something or engage about something or join in the conversation about something um then i can just go to the specific point that i have an interest in uh without just being bombarded with all of the the other stuff together the other thing that is uh great about discord is you can also kind of segment people as well so you could have little sub groups for things so that people could say well i'm only interested in certain things and so they only get access to certain things so where i've mentioned about obviously i've got these separate things for ecam live stream deck automation all that sort of stuff and people could actually select just the ones that they want to see so that these ones don't even appear for them if that is what they wanted but you can also create separate spaces so for example with my ecam live master class uh when people sign up to that then they do get access to the ecom live masterclass area of the discord server so that is kind of like a sort of members only area same with my buy me a coffee so it's good time to mention that buy me a coffee dot com take one tech that's the best way to support the channel on a one-off or ongoing basis and so if people have joined the buy me a coffee membership over there then they get access to some specific areas of the server that aren't available to everyone else so you can actually arrange people into different membership tiers things like that or just give them access as i say to things like courses where you want a little community around that specific course for people who are attending it so there's lots of ways that you can work with this with with different roles and things like that you still do have the ability in uh discord to uh you know tag people so people who are in the server you can actually tag them and uh and so that they will see those notifications and that there again is coming back to this whole thing of focus because rather than you know looking at facebook and seeing a notification about every single group that you're a member of and all of your personal facebook notifications just all mashed together in one big long list here when you come into the server uh it will actually say um the notifications that you have and so if you were mentioned in anything in that server so people can be a lot more intentional about what they're doing i mean part of my thing with productivity uh that i focus on with my you know my own task management management and things like that um one of the big lessons that you'll get from david allen's getting things done is the whole thing of context to all of the tasks that you have to do which is you don't want to be presented with all of the tasks that you've got on your task list um when a you can't necessarily do them because you don't have all the things you need at that particular time um or they're just not relevant to the task in hand as it were and so that i think translates quite nicely over to discord as well which is i don't want to see the notifications for everything that's going on in my life on facebook um just because i'm happy to happen to come to this particular group i only want to see the notifications that are relevant to this group if i'm being intentional about coming here so that is another thing that you will get in in discord is the sort of notifications you can also be very uh intentional about what you're doing in particular channels as well so you could turn off notifications on certain things and you know only be shown the things that that matter to you and you can also just sort of hide any things in this side column that you are not in the sidebar that you're not actually interested in or you don't want to receive notifications about um so the final thing though is the fact that it's not just a place for chat in terms of text chat and talk and things like that like you've got in facebook obviously with facebook you can do live streams into a particular group well you can do that in here as well but you can actually go one step further because you can actually do full on video calls and that might be that you want to be able to allow your community to come together you know just to have a general call like as if it was a zoom call but you can also do it if you were going to be doing a presentation or you know the equivalent of a live stream where you were the one that was uh streaming and you know you don't necessarily want everyone else to be jumping up so you could actually just do a effectively a live stream into your one of the the video channels in there as well there's also i'll just mention this one as well there's also the ability to do effectively the same as clubhouse so you can have a sort of voice it's not called a voice channel but uh something similar to a clubhouse whereby you can uh you can you know have a an audio only uh event at where you can still invite people up so effectively it's clubhouse uh potentially zoom it's kind of live streaming as well all wrapped into this with all of the the messaging and things like that all in all i feel it's just a much better sort of organizational uh structure to it now i did do a video previously which was sort of giving an overview of discord so definitely check that one out if you haven't already um but this is basically just a very sort of high level of the the reasons why i think that this is a a sort of better approach to um to managing a community and hosting a community than with um than with facebook groups now there is a much better resource than my channel to find out all about that and that is discord for creators now what i'll do is i'll leave a link to the playlist which contains a lot of discord for creative videos over on the right hand side and you can be become enlightened as i did after i discovered it you

Channel: Take One Tech... with Alec

Views: 3,545

Keywords: Discrod vs Facbook, Discord vs facebook groups, which is best discord or facebook, facebook groups, discord server, discord for communities, discord for creators

Id: nwWXTcYn0ho

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022