Online community forums have become indispensable in a modern digital society, where businesses aim to engage customers while gathering invaluable intelligence. Online communities allow customers to interact among themselves and directly with businesses, providing an open forum for dialogue.
Community forums offer numerous advantages to businesses. For instance, they can increase customer satisfaction or be an invaluable source of innovative product ideas. This post will examine different community forums, showing how they can be leveraged to meet various business goals. Furthermore, we'll offer top practices for creating an efficient client forum.
What is a Community Forum?
An Internet forum dedicated to community posts is readily accessible, allowing longtime users to gather, converse, exchange knowledge, and discuss interesting topics via knowledge base software with sophisticated customizations in order to resolve complex issues and complex questions.
An active forum gives space for customers and fans of a specific brand the ability to exchange knowledge among themselves and receive peer support while discussing company matters openly and honestly. Two types exist: External and internal. We'll have a look on all of these in fine detail:
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Forums Internet:
A forum for internal communication allows employees to discuss business matters in an informal setting. It can be used to share business and industry information or to solicit feedback from other teams within the company on a new concept. This internal forum promotes communication between employees and teams and helps to strengthen ties.
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Forums External:
Both employees and users can benefit from these types of forums. Users, community and employees can discuss the external face of your company in the community forum. Using the forum, for example, allows you to exchange files and solicit comments.
What Are Some Of The Most Important Features Of A Forum For The Community?
What features are needed in a forum now that you know the types and definitions of community forums? In addition to Best Practices for Community Management, the following features are essential:
- First, customers seeking information need to have access to a forum. The forum must include tips, techniques, and examples of solved problems.
- One of the most important qualities is the ability to respond to customers who do not need the help of customer service personnel.
- It should also include Analytics to help you understand how people use the bulletin boards and the quality of the replies.
Community forums are used by businesses to communicate with their clients and to answer questions about the products and services they offer.
Four Benefits of Having a Community Forum
Examine some of the potential benefits that you could expect to receive from a forum for community members:
Community Awareness Is Increased
A vibrant community forum can increase user engagement in all types of activities. It is an excellent way to increase a community's web presence. Your users will also feel more appreciated and heard when you create online communities.
Customers Will Enjoy A Smoother Interaction With The Company
An online community forum is a one-stop shop for your customers to get help, advice, tips, community, feedback, and more. Your customer's online experience is seamless, as they can get assistance from other community members.
Improves Your Customer Service
Customers can check the community forum to see if their issue has been solved. If they find the right solution, your customers won't have to contact customer service. Now, your support team can focus on complex problems. Community forums can expand customer service's focus on technical issues.
Revenues Are Significantly Increased
You can attract more members by allowing your members to contact you quicker. Increased revenue comes from more members. Creating and using a forum for your community will be incredibly beneficial.
Community Forums To Improve Your Business
Building a business community can have tangible and measurable outcomes. Businesses can gain valuable insights from community forums that will help them scale up, improve their engagement, and enhance their efforts.
Customer Support Is Key To Success
Your customer support team can respond more rapidly and effectively when providing customers with a place where they can raise queries or voice complaints - this enhances customer satisfaction while simultaneously decreasing support costs through forums; other users and admins of forums may answer customer inquiries which allows fewer support staffers to handle questions directly from customers; you could also respond within forums by including links that take customers directly to FAQs or self-service options.
Businesses can leverage community forums to avoid issues that might arise and find solutions quickly and efficiently. With this proactive approach, they could use information gleaned by monitoring communities to enhance services or products offered and increase customer retention and satisfaction levels.
Forums provide an avenue to foster customer community and loyalty; being familiar with a brand can compel customers to refer family and friends and write positive reviews that prompt more business transactions in the future.
Drive Organic Growth By Increasing Customer Engagement
Community forums offer an effective means of expanding your business and developing loyal customer bases. Brands can foster meaningful interactions and an engaging community experience by offering people the space to express themselves freely, thus strengthening customer engagement with and loyalty towards a brand.
Businesses can leverage forums to enhance products and services by regularly monitoring forums. When customers see that businesses listen to feedback and respond appropriately, their engagement increases dramatically, and they may become brand ambassadors themselves.
As customers engage with one another and your team in your community activity, they'll naturally produce content about it in the domain of content management - something you can leverage to drive organic traffic to your website if your community has been optimized for search engine optimization (SEO).
Create Better Products Together With Your Customers
Customers are the cornerstone of product innovation by taking their suggestions seriously and acting upon them to develop new items or develop creative new concepts for products or services. Businesses can leverage community forums to gather customer feedback about their products and services. By participating in forums, businesses can collect real-time customer opinions ranging from pricing to features - which they can then use by product designers to make informed decisions that satisfy audience demands.
Community forums provide an effective means of collecting customer feedback. To increase user interface adoption and facilitate greater user satisfaction, sharing your product's roadmap or informing them of updates can increase customer adoption, or providing educational materials can enhance user satisfaction.
Community Forums Are Available In Many Different Types
Forums Public Vs. Forums Private
Anyone can join public community forums. They are an excellent way to build community and have a dialogue. They can be a breeding place for harassment and trolls, which makes it difficult to moderate and leverage community engagement in all community sites with community syndication features and interactive community design to enhance community experience for larger communities with segmented communities.
On the other hand, private community forums offer members a more controlled and intimate environment to engage in focused, personal conversations. Private forums are less popular, but they can be a great tool to build strong relationships with others and foster deeper connections in a community.
Niche-Specific Forums Vs General Interest Forums
General interest forums provide greater exposure, while niche ones allow for targeted communication to specific groups or demographics. Reddit has even earned itself the moniker "front page of the internet".
These online review sites host thousands of groups on every subject imaginable and are frequently utilized by companies as marketing forums, but tread lightly; users prefer to avoid corporate talk in these general interest forums. However, general interest forums can provide invaluable data collection from customers.
Businesses could create niche forums to build communities and position themselves as industry leaders. Businesses should become valuable resources for their audience to use the forum effectively - sharing insights about industry happenings, answering customer inquiries, or hosting meetup groups are just a few ways they could do it.
Sephora is an outstanding example of a retailer that provides its members with a platform to exchange beauty tips, pose queries, and connect with fellow makeup enthusiasts. Both general and niche forums can prove valuable if their purpose is understood to maximize engagement with your target audience.
Forums On Social Media Vs Forums Standalone
Businesses often create modern communities on various social media platforms and even smaller subsets within those online community platforms to quickly build customer relations and foster loyalty among existing clients. Social media provides powerful community-building capabilities but may have downsides as it needs more data control and customization features that may limit its usefulness.
Separate community forums provide businesses with more engaged and focused communities, giving more control of the feed of community content moderating and being used for community growth and membership expansion. You will need to focus your energy to attract clients more successfully.
Social media provides businesses with an effective means of connecting with customers via customer service skills for excellent customer service for the user community as well as maintaining customer service standards in order to meet thriving communities. Through it, many can reach out and interact directly.
What You Should Look Out For When Selecting A Platform To Host A Community Forum
- Functionality and Features: Search for basic functionalities like user registration, moderator tools, search capabilities, the ability to create subforums, and multilingualism.
- Customization: Consider the degree of customization offered by the platform. Some platforms offer tools that allow you to customize the forum layout and navigation.
- Integration abilities: Can you easily integrate your forum with your company's other software and platforms? Powerful integrations simplify data management, providing a seamless user experience to your team members and customers.
- Performance and Scalability: Ensure the platform is scalable and capable of handling the traffic you anticipate. Social media-based community forums might work well at first, but once your community grows and you have more posts daily, upgrading to a platform with advanced features will be necessary.
- Privacy and security: The privacy and security of community forums are vital. Ensure the platform has robust security features like SSL encryption, two-factor authentication, and configurable permissions via multisite forum.
- Responsiveness to mobile devices: Many users will access forums via mobile devices. Consider your community software intuitive interface and design and if it has been optimized for mobile usage.
- Cost: Consider costs such as hosting, licensing, and maintenance fees.
- User-Friendliness: Both administrators and users should find it easy to navigate and use the platform. It is a complex task to create a forum. As your forum grows, you'll have to make regular changes. A platform that is easy to use will be a huge help. A forum software offering templates to make creating different areas easier is a big plus.
- Support: A community of users and a strong support network can be invaluable in building community forums. Search for platforms with a strong community and support resources such as documentation, tutorials, and onboarding.
Need help determining which community forum software will best suit your needs? Our list includes the pros and cons of each software, as well as pricing.
Building A Successful Community Forum
Community forums can turn into a wild west if you do not establish ground rules. Following the best practices can create a vibrant community that builds engagement, trust, and expertise. We recommend the following best practices:
Clarify Community Policies And Guidelines
Guidelines and policies are important in helping users understand participants' expectations on a forum, including what they can expect from them regarding behavior, language, and other aspects that make up its culture. The guidelines and policies should be clear, easily understood, and consistently enforced. Include a section that details the consequences of violating the policies and guidelines, including temporary or permanent suspensions.
Encourage User Participation
It is more important than ever to foster a culture of positivity in your forum. Users will be more inclined to join if they feel valued and welcomed. This can be achieved by engaging users and responding to comments and questions. You should also create interesting topics and encourage debate and community.
Create A Robust Moderation System
For a forum to function properly, it needs a moderator system. This will ensure that communities are in line with your community's guidelines. A clear procedure is needed to ensure all forum members follow the community guidelines. There should also be a system in place to manage violations. You may require a moderator if your forum receives many daily posts.
We have an Arion ERP community manager who is responsible for community moderating. It is beneficial to have someone with the sole responsibility of community moderation. You can establish a moderation system to promote healthy communication in your forum in many different ways.
Install A System Of Notification
If users receive a notification when a new topic is posted or when a user responds to their comments or questions, they are more likely to participate. Use email or push notifications to implement your notification system.
Promoting The Forum Through Social Media And Other Channels
Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be great platforms for encouraging people to join your forum. Promote your forum via email newsletters and blog posts that target your audience. Cross-pollinate your content between social media and community forums. Share content on both platforms to encourage more members and get feedback.
Trends In Community Forum Software
The Social Aspect Of Remote Work Will Certainly Increase
Since 2023, many companies have had to figure out quickly how to move from in-person or on-location processes and workflows to a digital environment where employees can work independently at home. By the end of the year, most people had figured out a way to work online successfully. However, we now need to catch up on the important but non-essential things office interaction gave us.
Integration Of Platforms Will Be Crucial
We all learned how to use new apps, tools, and platforms last year to replace the old ways we used to do things in person or at a location. Slack notifications, Microsoft Teams notifications, and emails were all bombarding us. We also had to learn how to use Zoom calls, Live-stream webinars on Discord, productivity apps, Google Docs folders, calendar events, Dropbox files, Dropbox downloads, etc.
Virtual Communities Are Replacing Video Calls And Webinars
Now we are all masters of Zoom. Every conference in 2023 was webcast; concerts or cultural shows streamed live; birthday parties have given way to virtual conferences. Zoom video calls won't just become stand-ins for standalone events in 2023 - they will instead become integrated with our online communities' surrounding social dynamics, offering greater integration of software and reconsidering the purpose and format of live events.
Support From The Community Will Be Increasingly Important
Experts reported recently that help centers across industries are expected to grow twofold by 2025; online communities will help businesses manage this growing caseload more effectively. Businesses, brands, and organizations can now utilize online communities to reach members and customers directly and provide self-serving support channels through them. Research reports in its 2023 Customer Engagement Trend Analysis that this is becoming a reality:
2023 will see a rapid expansion of community networks like this one. Customers, clients, and community members can help one another answer frequently asked questions via community managers, not only in retail environments. Educational institutions are exploring innovative ways of creating communities that enable students to self-organize and teach each other while connecting more easily with staff and teachers.
There Will Be A Day Of Reckoning For Social Media Platforms And Toxic Communities
Last year saw public and political disapproval for Silicon Valley platforms like Facebook reaching new levels. CEOs from Facebook and Twitter were repeatedly brought before the US Senate for intense questioning about their opaque practices in business, content moderating issues, role in fomenting extremism and disinformation spreading, election-related problems caused by social media, as well as how companies like Facebook are mining, monetizing and using user data - issues on online review highlighted during US political election chaos involving social media use; average users' growing concerns over this trend is another important topic of inquiry for them as users continue to worry over this trend that began years prior.
By 2025, more and more users will ditch traditional social networks in favor of #DeleteFacebook campaigns. In their place will emerge platforms with greater transparency, safety, and closed communities - such as when anger over WhatsApp changing its data policy resulted in the mass adoption of secure messaging apps like Signal or Telegram.
Conclusion
Community boards can be extremely helpful (and enjoyable) assets to businesses. Businesses looking to engage with clients, gather insight or develop solutions can use community forums effectively and strengthen business relationships stronger than ever.
Forums present limitless possibilities; stay calm. All it takes to build an active forum community is taking some time and planning; the rest will follow naturally. Get in touch with the best and most reliable community forum software solution for your business.
