Types of Forums

That's not entirely true. There are almost as many reasons to host an online community as there are community hosts, and the types of discussion threads accessible are nearly limitless. Depending on your organisation and goal, you'll want to consider which platform offers the best tools for your community, as well as how to design forums that speak to the needs and strengths of your audience.

Many traditional forum systems are only a collection of conversation threads. As online communities have grown beyond the confines of electronic bulletin boards, new types of commodities have evolved. Customer feedback, user support, and social brand marketing systems, as well as platforms that combine these and other features, are now accessible.

Discussion Forums

The discussion forum is the standard-bearer of forums, the virtual town square office or break room. Whether your objective is to build buzz or inspire workplace cooperation, nothing sparks a community like a passionate conversation about a timely issue. 

Look for a platform that enables you or your community manager to easily start new discussions while maintaining the status quo. By using an editorial calendar or setting up Google Alerts on certain subjects, you may start discussions with relevant content that is seasonal or in the news.

Feedback Forums

People like sharing their opinions, and this sort of platform is great for a company wanting to capitalize on this. You may use the feedback you get on your forums to enhance your products and services, as well as the customer experience. 

The feedback forum is also a terrific method to keep your consumers up to date while you're researching and developing new products, as well as when you're putting new ideas into action or launching new projects. In the age of Facebook and other social media platforms, feedback forums thrive when users can participate in surveys, vote on posts, "like" comments, and "push" popular responses to the top of a thread.

Q&A Forums

Resource sharing is an important facet of community, and open source and DIY-based organizations are growing in popularity, thanks in part to this beneficial aspect of human nature. The host or community manager of a typical Q&A forum offers customer assistance or answers user inquiries. For a low-cost "help desk," you may utilize a Q&A forum for members' complaints or difficulties to be handled by the community itself. 

A Q&A site is set up in such a way that anyone can ask any question they wish. They might inquire about people's schoolwork, relationship difficulties, business ideas, and so on. Questions are posed at random, and professionals in the community usually answer them for the user. In a questions and answers site, finding the answer for the individual may need some study. Where forums are topic-specific and do not allow the posting of simply any query. The topic of the query or new thread must be relevant to the forum.

Article Forums

A fourth form of forum is the knowledge base or articles forum. It differs from a discussion forum in that it also functions as a resource center. Given the popularity of the Internet as a source of information, providing a go-to resource for answers is one of the most successful ways to gain a loyal following. If the community can post how-to articles, videos and images, announcements, blogs, white papers, and other sorts of material, article forums are very valuable. Look for a platform that has a robust search engine that lets you search across all of a community's forums and subject types.

Whether you're operating a small private discussion group or planning something larger and more public, it's better to consider how you want to engage your audience before choosing an online community platform than it is to try to pack your audience into forums that don't quite fit the bill.

It’s really such nice information to get advantage from.best branding agency