IC (Invision Community) needs to start integrating with major social media platforms, beyond basic link sharing. We recently relented to demand and started a parallel FB "group" in addition to our existing FB business "page". It has resulted in a quite a few new users for our IC powered community site, but maintaining a "lite" version of the same community on a second platform is a huge burden.
Here are a few major pain points that IC could address with better integration:
It's a ton of work to duplicate every one of our major calendar events in the FB group. We create these as "link" type events on FB with the get-tickets/more-info link pointing back to our community site calendar event and the description of the event saying that to sign-up, you must click the link and do so on our community site. IC should have a share/promote/push feature that would create an event in our FB group (or a FB page) based on the IC calendar event (same date/time/photo and a link back to the IC event). This would be a huge step forward, even if it was a one-way push, and even if there was no further integration after the initial FB event creation (i.e. we'd have to make changes to the FB event manually if something in our community event changed or if it was removed).
Sharing an IC discussion topic to any social platform doesn't include a good preview image most of the time. This is because most people don't upload photos directly (as attachments), instead they embed a photo URL from a photo hosting/sharing site. IC should use the first photo in a discussion topic as the social share image even if it is an external URL. Yes, this would mean that there would need to be an option for IC to "always cache topic external preview images" even if the option to save/cache all external images was disabled.
We need even the most basic 2-way integration with social platforms... For example, If I promote/share anything from our community to FB, Twitter, IG, etc., then there should be an option to pull the comments from those other platforms back into our community and show them on that shared item. I know this is possible as I have another site powered by Wordpress and there is a plugin which does exactly this (pull the comments on a shared blog post from Facebook and mix them in with the native WP post comments). I realize this feature would require a lot of thought about how to effectively show those external comments (as a different thread or mixed within the native discussion but visually differentiated). However, I believe that if IC doesn't start putting in more work to integrate with popular social platforms (FB, IG, Twitter), then they are going to continue to lose entire communities to those platforms.
orp got a reaction from Nebthtet in How to inspire your community's members to engage
