Where Should Your Community Live? Weighing Social vs. Owned Platforms

“This is a super nuanced topic that always raises people’s hackles.”

That’s how longtime community strategist and leader Brian Oblinger describes the debate over where to build a customer community: on social platforms, in chat tools like Slack, or on a dedicated platform you own.

After decades of helping companies navigate this question, he offers a clear starting point: Yes, you should show up where your customers already are. And you should also think deeply about if, how, where, and when you can deliver a superior experience.

Choosing a platform isn’t a simple decision. It ties directly to the kind of community experience you want to create and whether your tools can support that vision as your community grows.

In this episode of the “Power of Connection” podcast, Brian and host Paul Schneider explore platform considerations and offer a more strategic way to think about scale and structure.

Note: elements of this content have been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

The Illusion of Easy

If you’ve ever pitched an owned community platform and heard, “Can’t we just use Facebook or Reddit?”…you’re not alone.

Social platforms feel deceptively simple at first. Your audience is already there. The interface is familiar. There’s no infrastructure to stand up or cross-functional buy-in to secure.

“I totally get the allure,” says Brian. “You’re not responsible for the platform. That’s offloaded to Reddit, Facebook, X, WhatsApp. And there’s a clear budgetary reason too.”

That ease makes sense when you’re trying to prove out the concept. But what works in year one often becomes a constraint in year two. Here’s why:

• You don’t control the experience. Visibility is determined by algorithms, not relevance. Design updates or feed changes can upend your content strategy overnight.
• Moderation is limited. You’re in a shared environment, often surrounded by unrelated content, competitor ads, and spam you can’t filter out.
• Structure is nonexistent. There’s no content hierarchy, no real tagging, no visibility settings.
• Analytics are shallow. Likes and impressions offer surface-level engagement, but there’s no user-level tracking, no integration with tools like CRMs or support platforms, and no ability to build custom reports.
• You can’t take it with you. If your community grows, and most teams hope it will, migrating to an owned space later isn’t seamless. Most social platforms don’t offer official ways to export member data or preserve historical context.

Why Slack and Discord Come Up

Social platforms aren’t the only “easy” option teams reach for early on. Tools like Slack and Discord often come up as a lightweight middle ground, especially if your team already uses them internally or your audience skews technical and chat-native.

They’re private and feel more controllable than public networks. But they introduce a different version of the same core problem: they weren’t built to support a growing, structured community.

“People start there, they experiment, which is great. It’s a low barrier way to do that,” says Brian. “But once they get past a few thousand members, it’s like, wow, there are no real moderation tools, the analytics don’t really exist, and you realize it’s not a community platform.”

While the environment feels different from social media, the constraints are similar. Slack and Discord are designed for fast, ephemeral exchanges, not for organizing knowledge across hundreds or thousands of customer conversations. Search is limited, structure is minimal, and there’s no way to segment or personalize the experience as the community grows. Migration isn’t much easier either. Slack offers only limited export options depending on your plan, and Discord provides almost no official way to move data. And crucially, Slack (now part of Salesforce) has made it clear they aren’t building a community platform and don’t intend to.

Why Structure Matters More Than Ever

Content is the raw material of community, but structure is what makes it usable.

And that structure matters more than ever in an AI-powered world. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini don’t generate knowledge from scratch. They learn from what already exists. That means content that’s organized, tagged, and rich in context is far more likely to be surfaced, understood, and reused.

“It stands to reason that we’re entering an ‘SEO 2.0’ era,” says Brian. “It’s a land rush, and those with the most relevant, high-quality, and accessible content are better positioned to show up more often, more accurately, and more prominently.”

Social-first communities, built for speed and not discoverability, often fall short here.

What You Get (and Take On) with an Owned Platform

Owned platforms offer a different model. You get more control and scalability. But they come with a different kind of investment.

With an owned platform, you shape the experience from the ground up. You decide how content is structured. You set the rules for visibility, moderation, and engagement. You get full access to the data. You own the member experience from end to end.

But with that control comes responsibility:

• You’ll need cross-functional buy-in, budget approval, and time to set things up before launch.
• Structure is a strength, but only if you keep it clean. Content needs to be pruned, tagged, and refreshed regularly.
• You’ll need to define workflows for onboarding, moderation, and programming, especially as the community grows.

Fortunately, platforms like Higher Logic Vanilla bring automation into the daily work of community management. With workflows you set up once, Vanilla can automatically do things like:

• Archive inactive posts or spotlight high-performing content
• Flag unanswered questions for moderators or support
• Personalize content based on member interests or lifecycle stage

You’ll also get a level of hands-on support that most social platforms don’t offer. Higher Logic Vanilla, for example, provides structured implementation and customer success resources to help you get the most value out of your community.

At the end of the day, there’s no perfect choice. The key is knowing what you’re optimizing for. If the goal is speed, a lighter option might get you off the ground faster. But if you want to build something that lasts—something that can evolve with your customers, align with your product strategy, and deliver measurable value—an owned platform gives you the foundation to do that.

The Hub-and-Spoke Model: Balancing Reach and Control

Instead of thinking in binary terms—social or owned—Brian recommends a more flexible approach: the hub-and-spoke.

In this model, your owned platform is the hub. It’s the center of gravity, where your most valuable interactions happen: peer-to-peer support, product feedback, onboarding guidance, and knowledge sharing. It’s structured, searchable, and built to scale.

The spokes are where you show up to meet your audience: LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack groups, or anywhere else your customers already spend time. These channels aren’t there to host the community. Their role is discovery: surfacing ideas, sparking interest, and pointing people back to the hub.

Again, the distinction comes down to intent:

• Social platforms are built for reach. They’re broad, fast-moving, and algorithm-driven.
• Chat tools are built for immediacy. Great for quick updates or support, but not for sustaining knowledge or context.
• Your hub is where relationships deepen, contributions get preserved, and value compounds over time.

This model gives you the best of both worlds. You maintain control and structure where it matters, without giving up visibility in the places your audience already shows up.

How to Know If an Owned Platform Is the Right Fit

It’s easy to think of an owned community platform as something you graduate to once your audience is big enough or your team has more resources.

But Brian encourages teams to flip that thinking. Choosing a platform isn’t just a tactical decision about tools. It’s a strategic decision about how you want to engage your customers and how seriously your company is willing to invest in that relationship.

So instead of asking which platform is easiest to stand up, ask:

• What is your community meant to accomplish?
• What kinds of interactions matter most?
• How important is it to have structure, data, and continuity over time?

Start with your goals. Then choose the platform that can actually support them.

In Brian’s experience, most companies are aiming for the same outcomes, even if they describe them in different ways:

• Lower support costs
• Faster onboarding
• Stronger retention
• Better product feedback
• Deeper customer loyalty and advocacy

And each of those goals has implications for how your community should be structured and what capabilities the platform needs to support.

• Support communities need searchable content, structured Q&A, and clear resolution workflows.
• Customer success communities benefit from onboarding journeys, personalized content, and lifecycle-based engagement.
• Advocacy programs thrive with recognition, visibility, and cross-functional coordination.
• Product communities rely on ideation tools, voting mechanisms, and closed-loop feedback.

Rethinking the Platform Decision

Where you build affects what you can build. It has second-order effects on almost every part of the business, from how quickly customers get help, to how effectively you onboard new users, to how product teams prioritize their roadmap, and how your entire company builds trust over time.

If there’s one mindset shift to make, it’s this: Don’t treat your community platform like a channel. Treat it like infrastructure.

Owned doesn’t mean isolated. It means anchored. And in a world where content quality, discoverability, and customer connection matter more than ever, that foundation is what sets you apart.