facebook is stealing my forum traffic

[importevolution]

I own a forum targeted toward car guys in our state. Running vbulletin 4.2 now. A lot of the people on my forum are also my friends on facebook. Over the last two years I've really started to notice my users are increasingly posting to facebook instead of the my forum. Not only that but the facebook posts/threads are bringing more responses/replies/interest/activity then they do on my forum. My traffic has noticeably went down due to face book and I could see the trend continuing

I'll admit I haven't played with vb5 very much so bare with me

but here is why i think i'm losing ground to facebook

1. the ability to tag other people into the conversation. this feature should have been default a looong time ago
2. superior smart phone integration. not completely sure what forumrunner is or who owns it but any app for the end user should be free and probably be distributed under the vbulletin name. my first test attempt to share a photo from my android gallery to this vbulletin.com forum was denied "we were unable to resize your photo so you will need to do it manually" ..... not acceptable this day and age

[wda2015]

Facebook is a killer for forum owns everywhere, I asked on my forum before taking it down and the answer from the members was "Facebook has everything all there at your finger tips so why don't you use it?".. that did it for me with forums.

[TLMD]

1. the ability to tag other people into the conversation. this feature should have been default a looong time ago

I know about a JIRA entry regarding this one, so please add your vote for it, if you want this being implemented:

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-1956

[Mark.B]

I just voted for that one, though I understand DBTech's add on does a pretty decent job of adding the feature in.

As for Facebook....it certainly doesn't help, but strong forums with decent content should continue to thrive as they offer something Facebook doesn't do very well.

[jdj]

We have the same problem: Users tend to post on Facebook (because they can). What brings people back to your site is content, that's true and for us the easiest parts of the site to populate are the CMS and the calendar. The blogs are also useful but the truth is we can't upgrade to vB5 because of the absence of CMS and calendar; so the truth is, it's not Facebook that's presently giving us a hard time, it's actually the amount of time it's taking for vBulletin to deliver feature parity.

[rexxxy]

I just voted for that one, though I understand DBTech's add on does a pretty decent job of adding the feature in.

As for Facebook....it certainly doesn't help, but strong forums with decent content should continue to thrive as they offer something Facebook doesn't do very well.

Well a lot of people have fb groups now with content and easier q&a

[adeel786]

I know about a JIRA entry regarding this one, so please add your vote for it, if you want this being implemented:
http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-1956

Just voted as well