Migrating a FB group to your own assets - Best route?

[Zach]

We have a 20k member private FB group that is a combination of a bunch of our customers + non-customers who are interested in our niche.

We also have a blog for our niche too. For sake of this discussion let's call it niche.com.

We are finding building an audience on FB is not the best long-run.

We want to attempt to migrate anyone + push all marketing efforts to a private forum/APP. The key part of this is PRIVATE. This is a private group only.

My question for you guys:

I see our situation moving forward as a bit of a fork in the road. Do I build an "app" to mimic a lot of the FB groups features, or do I do an online forum hosted on our niche.com site instead? Is there a way to do both? Would you rather build a big audience into niche.com or make an app?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I imagine that it will be harder and harder to reach members of your own group or page over time as Facebook continues to rip off their advertisers more and more deeply.

But at the same time, people are on Facebook because they want to be there. Your group may simply be a side-effect of that, a consequence of their Facebook usage, for a lot of the members.

I'm assuming if you try to migrate them to a private forum or app, you'll lose well over 50% of them. So then you'd probably want to maintain both the app and the FB group.

The real question is, let's say you get 25% of them to your app. Is that enough for the conversation and momentum to run itself or will you have to baby sit it a ton to keep it active?

And also, can you plunder more ROI out of that 25% on your own app to the point that it's worth not getting revenue from the other 75% (that's albeit already lower anyways)?

And will the Average Order Value and the Customer Lifetime Value of those 25% improve in any meaningful way by having them in a private app instead of the FB Group? And how long until that overcomes the price of development too.

Lot's to consider. I would NOT host the forum on your niche.com/forum/ though. Your best move is to do it like this: forum.niche.com on a sub-domain so the quality of the forum doesn't tank your quality scores on the main site (the sub-domain will be evaluated as it's own site).

 

[Zach]

I am not too worried about monetization of this group, I just want to provide a better experience for their needs. Our FB group is just a wall of posts/text/memes that many times is not the true essence of quality discussion our group members need.

We plan on keeping the FB group live for those who prefer to interact there, but are making the app experience for those who want a more targeted discussion environment. This migration is more about the user. Business benefits are secondary.

Consumer benefits: Better targeted discussions, useful tracking tools, more relevant targeted niche.com content.
Business benefits: Another growth channel. Better consumer data. Better product targeting. No FB "squeeze" down the road.

I wanted to integrate some personal "tools" into our app too that allow users to track a couple handy things in their lives. I think this may be the main reason I want an app -- for a wellness tracking tool, it's an easy homepage click on your phone instead of navigating to the web to find your own data. More personable.

The real question is, let's say you get 25% of them to your app. Is that enough for the conversation and momentum to run itself or will you have to baby sit it a ton to keep it active?

We have admins who can help lube the discussions and interaction...plus can do some promoting around this or make some "install bait" to help generate some incentive. "Download to access your 1-time discount code inside the app now!"