Moving a community from a Facebook Group to Zendesk Communities

[gillianwu]

Hi, Feverbee community! As a newly minted Community Manager at my company, my first challenge is getting members of our large, active, and highly-engaged Facebook group to start using a Zendesk Communities forum instead.

Moving our community to a Zendesk forum will help us be more systematic, more responsive, and more data-driven in our Product decisionmaking. At this point, it’s not a matter of whether we should move the community, but how best to do so.

What are your tips and best practices for getting folks off of Facebook and into a structured forum? Have you or your colleagues done this successfully? What should I be thinking about, and what should I expect? Do you know of any resources?

I feel a little bit like a beekeeper getting ready to move my bees to a new hive

[richard_millington]

I think @madtownjessie is from Zendesk who might be worth chatting to.

You might want to watch from Udemy do as well, I’m sure they’re thinking about moving from FB groups at the moment.

Also follow what this thread:

Chronicling the transition of a hobbyist Facebook Group to an online community

Here’s a listing of the transition steps I’ve taken in the last month: Feb 1-10: I individually contacted (via FB Messenger) about 20 of the most active Group members to ask if they might be willing to help me plan the next phase of the community by joining a private FB Group which we would use for planning Feb 13: I set up a welcome topic in the FB Planning Group and individually contacted those who confirmed interest (about 15) a URL to request admission to the Group. When they did, I re…

[gillianwu]

Thanks, Richard. We ended up choosing UserVoice for product ideas and suggestions and an integrated Zendesk community for support/success. Happy to help our community with questions about the platform differentiators and how we’ve found success with a dual-platform approach.

[nic_says_hi]

Hey Gillian -

I’m the Community Manager for the Zendesk support community. I’d be interested to hear more about how you’re leveraging UserVoice in combination with our platform - it’s a use case a lot of our customers have and I’d love to hear how you set it up and how it’s working for you.

[gillianwu]

Sure. Shoot me an email or book some time on my calendar - gillian@simplepractice.com or calendly.com/gillian-simplepractice.

[gillianwu]

We ended up keeping the Facebook group, incidentally. Our customers just don’t seem to engage with BBS as well, and the Facebook group has a lot of features that BBS doesn’t (polls, reactions, threaded replies, etc.) so we are currently leveraging Facebook, UserVoice, and Zendesk in tandem. There’s some cross-pollination between the three.

Also, saw you’ll be in SF soon, want to meet up? Would love to pick your brain. I’ll be there in mid-April over the weekend (13th and 14th.) I owe you a coffee at the very least, Buzzing Communities changed my life.