The option to monetize a group natively is available only to Facebook creators who meet the eligibility criteria. However, you can always monetize your group through affiliate marketing and by selling courses and other products on your website.
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If you’re thinking about starting an online community, Facebook Groups is the top choice among social media platforms. Why wouldn’t it be? Groups are free, you might already have an audience there, and it has decent community-building tools as well.
However, with limited customization options and control over your community, Facebook Groups isn’t the right option for everyone, so creators often look for an alternative.
One such alternative is Mighty Networks, which is a standalone online community builder. So the question is: Which option is right for you?
To answer, we’ve created a comprehensive Mighty Networks vs Facebook Groups comparison. We’ll explain the concept behind these two platforms and cover the pros and cons in detail.
Let’s get started!
Mighty Networks and Facebook Groups are the two most popular platforms that allow you to create an online community. However, comparing these platforms is like comparing apples and oranges—they’re very different. Let us explain what we mean by that.
Mighty Networks is basically a software platform that provides you with the infrastructure and the tools you need to create a community on your own website. The community you create belongs to you, and you control all its aspects.
Facebook Groups, on the other hand, is a function on Facebook that allows you to create a community within the social network. The group you create belongs to Facebook, and you’ll have partial control over your content and audience.
So that’s the gist of these two platforms. Let’s now move on to their individual aspects and compare them head to head.
When it comes to Mighty Networks vs Facebook Groups, there are certain key differences between them. We have categorized them to make it easier to compare and contrast the two platforms.
The most important factor for the success of any online community is the end-user experience, and it all starts with the user interface.
With Facebook, the math is simple. The social media platform has been around for nearly two decades, and people use it daily. So, most people are familiar with the platform, which translates to Facebook Groups having an uncomplicated learning curve.
While people’s familiarity with Facebook goes in its favor, the noise this social media platform generates goes against it. Your members can easily get distracted on Facebook, with notifications and ads cluttering the feed.
Another downside is related to content discoverability. Users don’t have control over what they want to see from your group. They can’t personalize their feed or set up custom notifications.
Add to that the privacy and security concerns people have regarding how Facebook uses personal information, and you’ll have a few reasons to consider an alternative to Facebook Groups.
While Mighty Networks isn’t as popular as Facebook, it has a clean design, and all the features are well organized, so your members will find their way around the platform quickly.
They won’t be exposed to ads, and they can filter their feeds according to their preferences.
The platform also has several features, such as a discovery page, hashtags, and powerful search functionality to ensure users easily find the content they’re interested in.
Moreover, Might Networks has a robust notification system that lets your members choose what they want to be notified about and through what channel, leading to a superior user experience.
Finally, Mighty Networks has a mobile app that allows your members to access your community and engage with it on the go. You can also get branded apps for your community.
Facebook, meanwhile, doesn’t have a dedicated app for the Groups functionality. Users can still access groups through the main Facebook app, but they don’t get a specialized experience.
One big reason why dedicated online community builders are becoming so popular is that they put you in control of your community.
With Facebook Groups, your community belongs to Facebook, and you don’t have full control over the content or the audience in your group.
For instance, Facebook has the right to remove your content or even suspend the entire group if it doesn’t comply with its policies. To make matters worse, you can’t export data out of Facebook Groups or take your community elsewhere.
In fact, you don’t even control what your group members get to see in their feeds. It’s all decided by Facebook’s algorithm.
Meanwhile, with Mighty Networks, your community lives on your website, so you don’t have to worry about censorship. You also have full control over what content to show to your members and how to engage with them.
In Mighty Networks, everything in your community, including your members’ data, belongs to you. If you want, you can export it and move it to another community platform.
Another big aspect of control is customization.
A Facebook group has a preset structure, and there’s not much you can do to change it. You can’t create subgroups to better organize your community or modify the layout in any way.
Plus, you have no control over group branding except changing the cover photo and applying a custom color.
Mighty Networks, on the other hand, gives you much more control over your community’s structure and design:
Overall, Mighty Networks is a better choice if you need more control, flexibility, and ownership of your community.
In this section, we’ll talk about the tools each platform offers for building an engaged online community.
First off, we must say that Facebook does a decent job regarding community engagement. It has all the important features, including rich discussion posts, community polls, events, live videos, and group chats.
Mighty Networks also includes all these tools. However, it offers several additional features for enhancing the member experience.
First, Mighty Networks lets you create online courses. You can build your curriculum, host your course videos, and deliver your content.
With Facebook Groups, you have a feature called Guides that lets you organize and highlight important content from your group, but it isn’t a substitute for a proper online course.
Additionally, Mighty Networks offers a few unique features, such as a welcome checklist and Icebreaker questions, which are great for fuelling engagement in your community.
Overall, Mighty Networks has a slight edge in the engagement department.
Monetizing your Facebook Groups isn’t that straightforward.
To charge subscriptions on Facebook, you need to meet specific criteria. For example, your business page must have at least 10,000 followers, and your posts must earn 50,000 engagements over a 60-day period.
You can always accept payments outside, but then there’s no way to add/remove members into your group automatically. You’ll need to handle everything manually, which is a big pain.
In Mighty Networks’ case, the story is completely different. The platform has built-in monetization tools, which you can use to charge for access to your community or certain spaces inside your community.
To start accepting payments, you just need to connect your Stripe account with your Mighty network, and the platform will take care of the rest.
Regarding pricing options, you can charge a one-time payment or a recurring subscription fee. You’re also able to set different access levels for your members and apply discounts or offer a free trial.
Overall, it’s way easier to monetize your community with Mighty Networks than with Facebook Groups.
Now let’s compare the reporting and analytics tools that Facebook Groups vs Mighty Networks offer.
With Facebook Groups, you get access to the Insights tab, where you can see some basic metrics about community engagement and growth.
These include the number of posts and comments, most engaged group members, new membership requests, member growth over time, etc.
In the case of Mighty Networks, you get much more detailed analytics on every aspect of your community, from active members to their activity to your revenue.
The platform further offers detailed information about different functionalities and how many members use them or how often. This includes discussion posts, live streaming, online courses, member chats, and more.
The granularity of the available reports is truly impressive, and it uses a variety of charts and heatmaps to represent the data visually. You can track these metrics at the community level or for individual spaces as well.
One area where Facebook Groups seems like a tempting option relates to pricing and, in this case, the lack of it. No investment is required to start a group since the platform generates revenue through advertisements, allowing it to remain free.
Mighty Networks has subscription-based pricing, charging you directly. But the platform won’t monetize your audience in any way.
There are five pricing plans, and the lowest one is the Community plan, costing $39/month.
The Courses plan, which is the most popular one, costs $119/per month. There’s another tier—Business plan—that costs $219/month.
And if you need branded community apps, you’ll need Mighty Pro, the pricing of which is available on request.
Now that you understand the differences between the two platforms, let’s explore the scenarios where using one will be more beneficial than the other.
If you’d like to explore the platform in more detail, you can read our full review of Mighty Networks.
We hope you enjoyed reading this Mighty Networks vs Facebook Groups comparison. Which of these two platforms are you leaning towards? Do you have another platform in mind? Leave a comment and let us know.
In this guide, we discussed in detail the differences between Facebook Groups and Mighty Networks. Both platforms have unique advantages and disadvantages, which actually makes the choice between the two simple.
If you want to build a free community and grow it organically by tapping into Facebook’s audience, creating a group is the way to go. But that’s the only scenario where we recommend using Facebook Groups.
Otherwise, Mighty Networks will work better in most scenarios. Whether you want to create a niche community, a private community for your course/membership, or even a paid community, it will work better for you.
If you’d like to give Mighty Networks a try, click the button below and start a 14-day free trial (no credit card required).
Mighty Networks is better than Facebook Groups because it gives you more control over your community. It also has better engagement tools and offers built-in monetization features. Finally, it allows you to create a safe environment free of distractions, resulting in a better user experience.
Mighty Networks is a specialized community builder, while Groups is only one of Facebook’s features. While Mighty Networks does better regarding user experience, ownership and control, community engagement, and monetization, Groups is completely free to use.
Yes, you are the owner of all content with Mighty Networks. It’s your community, and you own the content and the members’ data, which is one of the main reasons for its popularity.
Hi, I’m Kate Nash, a content writer at Sell Courses Online. I have been an instructional designer since 2002, where I created a variety of different training and leadership development programs with Fortune 500 companies for 18 years. In 2020, I left the corporate world to help online course creators deliver programs their clients and customers love.
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