Building community is important for every brand, business, or creative. Whether the concept behind Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans is true or not, successful enterprises gather and engage people.
Traditionally, people have used tools like Facebook Groups or Discord to organize and engage with their community members. But if you’ve ever been in a Facebook group or Discord server, you know there are huge downsides to using these platforms. Especially if you are trying to run a professional group or program.
This blog post is going to discuss the downsides of Facebook Groups and Discord and then show you how AirSend’s unique tools and organization can help when it comes to community building.
Limitations of Facebook Groups and Discord
All of the limitations of Facebook Groups and Discord fall into one of two categories: lack of organization or lack of professionalism.
Lack of Organization
Social platforms like Facebook and Discord are fun and addicting due to their immediacy. New posts pop up on your feed, then disappear. There’s always something fresh and interesting to look at. The same features that make these platforms fun make them unsuitable for building a professional community.
The only way to organize evergreen content is to pin posts, but that isn’t enough for most professional communities. Where do you put the PDF worksheets that every new member should get? How do you make sure everyone sees your new video before it gets lost in the sea of other posts and messages?
The inability to control what your members see, when they see it, and provide permanent access to essential content are the greatest limitations of Facebook Groups and Discord.
Lack of Professionalism
The other limitation is the lack of a professional feel and experience. Facebook groups and Discord servers are great for a variety of groups: book clubs, friend groups that want to stay connected after graduation, and gamers, to name a few. But when it comes to professional communities, the user interface and features may give people the impression of being too casual.
AirSend for Professional Communities
This is where AirSend comes in. With AirSend, you can create public and private Channels to accommodate any professional community.
Within these Channels, you can still send and receive messages just like with Groups and Discord. But features like the Wiki and file organization system (see below) make organizing and accessing content easy for you and your community members.
And finally, as you can see, the AirSend interface is simple and professional, unlike Groups and Discord.
Ready to Try AirSend?
If you’re itching to ditch Facebook Groups and want to see how easy it can be to run your professional community using AirSend – sign up for your free account here.
Have more questions? Ask them here.