Online Communities ♥ (heart) Social Networks!

But wait… why can’t I just use Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter as my ONLY community network? I get this question often.

Here are a few reasons not to go “all in” with only the external networks:

1. They own the user experience. Though Facebook claims you YOUR content, it doesn’t allow you to control permissions or own content on a granular level for your audience. Not the best scenario when your managing employee or customer support communities.
2. The permissions, privacy and features can change on a dime… we’ve seen this happen with Facebook many  times. You don’t want to exclusively bet on their feature roadmap for your organization’s community efforts.
3. They don’t integrate with your CRM, HR System or ERP. You should integrate business rules to your community permissions (see graph below). This is a big concept in Social CRM.
4. They want to monetize YOUR users. Your business models are not aligned. You can’t control or monetize the advertising to your users.
5. Once your users get all your value on the external network, your value proposition is dilluted. They can then self organize there without you.

This graph demonstrates the relationship between your own community, your databases, and your external social networks. Again, a big part of Social CRM.

So how do you leverage external social networks?

• Awareness > Engagement > Conversion (thanks to @PeterKim for these steps): Use external sites as a way to create awareness and engage your audience. Have conversations with your users and when appropriate, bring them in to YOUR private community where you can deliver more relevant value and have a more appropriate interaction with them. Then focus on conversion. A tool like HootSuite.com can help you monitor and publish with social networks.
• Social Sign On and Registration. Allow your users to sign on using their Facebook or other accounts. The web is now ubiquitous and users should be able to go from site to site without authenticating each time.
• Use Facebook Ads & Pages to market your network. Facebook Ads let you target very specific niche users who may be interested in connecting back to your own branded community. Your Facebook Page is an portal that should include photos, news, conversations and energy.
• Be where your users are! Chances are your audience uses LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, Foursquare, Meetup and more… Maybe you don’t want to create a presence on Match.com if your audience is there, but ya never know! It could work. (watch for a future blog on this topic).

In summary, your community represents more than just the site you have branded that integrates with your website. Work with the external social networks, not against them. And at the same time, the external social networks should not be your exclusive community platform.

View more from @PeterKim here or on Slideshare.net