BuddyBoss Consultant Advice for a Great Facebook Group Replacement

It’s the Perfect Facebook Group Replacement

I consider myself an expert BuddyBoss consultant. My team and I build 1 or 2 BuddyBoss projects a month. We build 3 or 4 projects a month using LearnDash with e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce, Keap, ThriveCart and several others.

I reviewed the BuddyBoss solution two years back when it was called the Social Learner for LearnDash. You can click here for the earlier article. They have been committed to supporting learning communities a while. They continue to be tightly integrated with systems like LearnDash and LifterLMS.

If you are familiar with the things that make learning communities successful, you’ll know that including a community with it improves the learning. It keeps learning in the program and reduces dropout rates. Many course builders will include a Facebook group with their solution just for that purpose. It pull the learner out of lone ranger mode. An active, engaged community makes members feel like they are part of something bigger. Community members support each other, answer questions, encourage each other and offload work that would otherwise be done by the owner of the site, the learning site creators.

As a BuddyBoss Expert, I highly recommend it for business owners building a learning environment and are wanting that interaction between members. If you don’t think building the community is something you want now, but think you may want it in the future, give it a try. BuddyBoss community features can be disabled and turned on later when they are needed. It’s better to do it this way then to start without BuddyBoss and then migrate over to it.

BuddyBoss Consultant Describes the Solution

What people call Buddyboss is really two products.  It’s made up of the BuddyBoss Theme and BuddyBoss Platform Pro. When you buy the BuddyBoss Theme, you get a theme that’s tailor made for the Platform Pro product.  The Theme includes a copy of Platform Pro so you don’t have to go out and get this free, open-source product separately. The installation process for both is straightforward using the instructions provided.

BuddyBoss continues to positioned itself as a platform that supports multiple LMS systems. We get many requests for LearnDash compared to LifterLMS which they support well. If you visit the BuddyBoss for LearnDash sales page, you’ll find a page with information aimed at the needs of potential LearnDash users. Visit their BuddyBoss for LifterLMS sales page and it’s about the same, but the explanations are aimed at LifterLMS users. Both of these LMS-focused sales pages take you to the same BuddyBoss pricing page. They sell you one product and covers both LMSes.

If you talk to learning site owners that use Facebook groups for this interaction, you’ll hear comments like the following:

  • Facebook is great because our customers are already on it. We don’t have to give them another place to login to interact with other members.
  • Facebook is toxic. Sure we can build a community for our learners, but it’s filled with so many distractions that work against what we are wanting for our users.
  • Facebook group formats our data so we can’t use it effectively over time. We can’t create places where our members interact in a way that works well for what it is we are teaching them.

The explanations vary. It works well for a lot of people, but it’s a problem for others.

BuddyBoss Consultant Explain Why This vs Facebook

BuddyBoss’ solution is focused on:

  • supporting tribe learning with people working  together to a common end;
  • getting members to interact using several methods to communicate; and
  • enabling people farther along in a program to help those that are newer to your program.

Since you aren’t in a Facebook Group, you have the ability to organize the communication features you provide your members so it works naturally with your content. You can add a discussion thread for people taking one course together. Each member can message others that have agreed to connect with them. From there on, they can communicate using a Facebook messaging like feature. You can configure your environment to allow members of your program to start new discussion areas. It has a lot of different options and those can be used flexibly like you can with any WordPress site.

If you are interested in creating your own community and not have to depend on Facebook groups so you maintain full control of your environment and content, BuddyBoss gets you that.  It’s designed to give you extensive social media features. Our experience is it works really well.

Hope this helps!