What Type of Online Forum is Right for My Community?
An online forum is a forum is a forum, right?
Well not exactly. There are as many reasons to host an online community as there are community hosts, and the possibilities for types of discussion threads are unlimited. Depending on your organization and your mission, you’ll not only want to think clearly about which platform provides the best tools for your community, you’ll also want to style forums that speak to the needs and strengths of your audience.
Many traditional forum platforms are simple discussion threads. Yet as online communities have proliferated outside the narrow confines of techie bulletin boards, other types of products have arisen. There are now platforms that can focus on customer feedback, user support or social brand building, for example, as well as platforms that combine these and other features.
Discussion Forums
The standard-bearer of forums, the discussion forum, is the virtual town square office or break room. Whether your intention is to create a buzz or stimulate collaboration between coworkers, nothing sparks a community faster than a lively conversation on a timely topic. Look for a platform that allows you or your community manager to easily seed new topics while keeping ongoing discussions going. By utilizing an editorial calendar planned out in advance or setting Google Alerts on various topics, you can initiate conversations with relevant content that is seasonal or in the news.
Feedback Forums
People love to offer their opinion, and this style of forum is tailor-made for a company wanting to capitalize on that fact. You can use the feedback provided on your forums to enhance your customer’s experience and improve your products or services. The feedback forum is also an excellent tool for engaging your customer base when researching and developing new products and for updating your community when you are implementing new ideas or initiating new programs. In the age of Facebook and other social media platforms, feedback forums thrive when members can participate in polls, vote on posts, “like” comments and “push” popular responses to the top of a thread.
Q&A Forums
Sharing resources is one important aspect of community, and open source and DIY-based communities are on the rise, in part, due to this helping aspect of human nature. In the classic Q&A forum, the host or community manager offers customer support or responds to inquiries from users. Alternatively, for a low overhead “help desk” you might consider using a Q&A forum for members’ problems or issues to be solved by the community itself. The online architecture and interior design community, Houzz, does this very well. They ask members and visitors to post photos of home decorating problems and encourage other members to suggest solutions. For companies, making it easy for your customers to help one another increases brand awareness and loyalty, helps you manage day-to-day trouble shooting, and provides feedback about your products and service. Look for an online platform where the community manager and members can easily tell when a question has been successfully answered or can vote for the best solution.
Article Forums
A fourth type of forum is the knowledge base or articles forum. It differs from a discussion forum by offering a clearinghouse for information. With the rise of the Internet as the most popular source for information, providing a go-to place for answers is one of the best ways to grow a loyal following. Article forums are particularly helpful if the community has the capability to post how-to articles, videos and images, announcements, blogs, white papers and more. Look for an online platform that has a robust search function that allows searches across a community’s different forums and forum types.
Whether you run a small private discussion group or envision something larger and more public, you’ll have a better outcome if you consider the ways you want to engage your community before choosing an online community platform rather than trying to squeeze your audience into forums that don’t quite fit the bill.