Monday, February 28, 2011

Is meetup.com dead?

Three years ago i was looking for Germans in my area. I did found meetup.com a group network site. IT has a lot of features on top of groups. You can download badges and charge members of your group a fee. Every location can be defined how many people can attend and it shows rating of the meeting.
However a year ago i decided to give up the meetup group i had because the fees went up to the sky. Meetup is as organizer not free, you have to pay fees which are depending on amount of members. The more members you have the more you pay.
We decided with our group not to charge for our members, at the end i came up to pay over $70 a month because we had over 200 members.
A friend of mine took the group and deleted first all inactive members (which is is a nice feature to see who is inactive - who did not attend any meetings). But eventually he had problems with meetup.com that they charged more than they should. Maybe they need money.
Meetup is losing more and more groups since Facebook started their groups. We moved as well to Facebook. First of all most of our members are in Facebook and the meetup Facebook connection is not the best. Second of all Facebook is free. No charge for having members. Within only 1 week many of our active members at meetup did join our FB group. FB makes it much easier to have multiple administrators. At meetup you can assign assistants to your account but not other administrators which was many times a problem, since i travel a lot and could not keep up with the group as an adminsitrator.
The group function in FB is perfect integrated in FB, i need only one place to go to see my groups and what is going on. Before i had to log into FB and meetup.
Facebook groups is more than competition to meetup.com and i can see meetup slowly going away.
Pretty sure Facebook will soon offer administrators to charge members FB credits to be a member and then there is completely no need for meetup.

I you consider to start a social group, you might want to use FB group function instead of meetup. The fees at meetup are too high and if they don't waive the fees they might be sooner or later out of business.
FB groups can have events like at meetup and they show even up in your FB calendar. The communication within FB is much easier than within meetup. Try it out, it is easy.

3 comments:

  1. Yes. In my opinion, Meetup.com is totally worthless. I've joined several groups and found nobody has posted anything for months or even years. Even when people have posted this year, I put up a discussion and nobody looks at it or responds. I'd say Facebook has taken over.

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  2. Facebook groups do not feel location - very hard to find groups that are located nearby. There is www.eventbrite.com if you charge or events, www.evite.com if you have events with friends who's emails you know, and www.hobbygroups.com which is similar to meetup but free.

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