Facebook serves posts to people's feeds based on who
Facebook want to see posts according to their algorithm, not what the
users want to see (which in turn is based on maximising profit from their own advertising platform).
If you navigate to a Facebook group, posts are arranged according to algorithms, based primarily around popular discussions and not logical categories or chronological order. Facebook has ways of identifying commercial posts and will de-prioritise those in favour of paid/sponsored advertisers.
This guy runs a clinic right, well if he has a Facebook page, Facebook controls who sees his posts from the page and how many impressions. This is artificially limited to force you to pay for clicks. I have a page with over 15K followers. If I post something, it might get 1,000 impressions and sent to who Facebook wants to see it according to their algorithm.
By contrast, on a forum, a user selects what he or she wants to read, based on logical sorted categories.
Facebook groups are not indexed by Google or other search engines - at least not in a meaningful way - and users trying to find content through organic searching will not find them on a Facebook group. Organic searching is still one of the major ways of connecting users to traffic, which in turn has an impact on traffic and the effectiveness of advertising. Facebook does not provide any visible to group administrator over what sort of traffic their group attracts, nor how which it earns Facebook. This is morally questionable, as the traffic is off the back of the group administrator's work, who is not given any share of the advertising revenue Facebook generates from the group.
By contrast, forums can be trawled by search engine bots and by large do OK in terms of search engine page rankings (also recent tweaks by Google have started favouring large commercial sites over forums which has led to large traffic drops for owners of smaller websites). A quiet forum measured by posts per day can still attract disproportionally large traffic due to favourable search indexing. My site for instance has 80% of page views from organic searching, mostly from Google (but increasingly from DuckDuckGo). However, to get this kind of ranking requires time and effort to build up a solid database of quality content. Since very established forums have completely disappeared due to traffic migrating to social media platforms, I imagine that getting a new forum off the ground these days would be very difficult indeed, let alone building up a solid database of information that will generate regular organic search traffic.
Also
AndrewUSA wrote: ↑Mon Mar 11, 2019 5:10 am- Much harder to share videos.
It's actually easy. Either
(a) allow users to upload video as an attachment and use inline embed.
(b) Put video on Youtube. Include youtube link in post. Done - video displays in post.
- Extra steps to upload photos.
There are no extra steps. It's the same number of steps as a Facebook post. Add attachment. Done.
On my forum, this can be done with a phone. Image is automatically resized. Image is automatically rotated to correct orientation matching EXIF tags.
- No “like” feature. (Yes, I know there’s an unapproved extension that has some issues.)
Incorrect. There is a validated Thanks for Posts extension that can changed to a "like" feature by simply editing the language file to change "thanks" to "like.
I use Naguissa's unapproved Thanks for Posts extension which I have converted to a like system. It works flawlessly without any issues. You can see it in action at my forum:
www.ausrotary.com
Hope that helps.