Why Are There Two BOC Facebook Sites?

[mmichellich]

Every once in a while another BOC Facebook Site pops up. Looks like it has not been active for a while but it has some excellent material, like the tutorials for newer boaters, eg anchoring. What caused the two Facebook sites?

[ksanders]

We have one facebook page here

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1564094367157467/

There are other people that have competing FB groups as well.

We do not allow posting on our FB group anymore. The reason is simple... When people post there FB gets the content. When you post at the forum, we get the content, which makes it searchable for other members making the BOC forum a more relevant resource.

[fritzman]

I for one think that is better, thank you Kevin.

[ksanders]

I for one think that is better, thank you Kevin.

Thanks!

The challenge here is twofold...

First I understand that people like posting on facebook, and that it is a prefered platform for many.

The challenge is that I cannot allow the BOC to become just another facebook group, and that is the path I saw us on. Prior to shutting down the discussions on the FB group there were about as many new conversations on the FB group as there were here on the BOC. It’s easy to see that if we allowed that to progress, the forum, the site, the BOC itself, would become irrelevant in short order as FB would become the dominating platform.

What I am trying to do now is to use FB as a way to “advertise” that the BOC is out there, and is active, and is the place to go for all things Bayliner related.

This has resulted in a significant increase in membership here, on the real BOC.

The downside is that some will only post on FB and that there will be other FB groups that gain popularity. There is nothing I can do about that except to help make the BOC a easy to access, easy to use platform that has the information boaters need.