Forums are dead, extinct!…at least as we used to know them. Most forums you used to frequent have probably either shut down or are ghosts of themselves in terms of traffic and activity. Social media killed forums, but didn’t solve the core problem forums solved; in fact, social media only made it worse.
What forums are not
Forums are not about the individuals; rather, they’re about a shared interest. Nobody comes to a forum to see what you had for breakfast or where you went vacationing unless it aligns with the forum’s subject or theme. The closest you’ll get to a dopamine hit is when many users engage with a helpful post you made or contribute answers to your question.
If the community deems you knowledgeable on the topic or genuinely in need, then you get engagements. Users are there to rub minds with those of common interest and stay on topic, not to get distracted by personal stuff. There are always personal squabbles, as you would expect, but they are, more often than not, rooted in the topic of discussion.
What forums are
Forums bring together people who share a common interest, offering them the opportunity to discuss various topics related to their shared interest.
Forums are primarily meant for users to share their experiences and learn from others in a well-structured manner. They are topical in nature and stick to a specific topic in each thread. What makes forums excel in this is their structure (sorted into sub-forums, threads and pages), easy crawlability and indexability by search engines. The linking structure of forums makes it possible even for specific comments to show up in search engine results.
If you found a reputable forum on a subject or topic, you can rest assured that you’ll get in-depth knowledge because several possible scenarios will be mentioned/debated. A Forum is more than just commenting; it’s a robust, drill-down discussion. Years later, you can still find the discussions in search results, and they could help you resolve a burning issue.
This makes forums the perfect platform to archive discussions that could still get referenced years down the road.
Why did forums lose to social media
It’s all about massive personal data harvesting and dopamine; two things Forums aren’t built to give. Social media’s biggest competitor is sleep! It’s highly engineered for engagement. There are no helpful or unhelpful posts, only posts that stir the hornet’s nest and those that don’t. Those that do must be good and are boosted by the algorithm. The shallower the better. There’s also the privacy angle. Everything about you is tracked, your phone is literally a personal tracker for Big Tech.
Forums cannot compete with these because they’re against the very reason people join forums in the first place.
What do forums do better than Social Media?
I have both owned and joined groups on platforms like Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. They’re a conversational nightmare! The randomness is mind-boggling, and good luck finding past helpful responses in the haystack of posts. Worst of all is the search engine indexing. Content on these platforms is only made for the moment, you’re on your own anything after.
Forums’ biggest strength is their threaded nature. This makes it very easy to follow conversations. Throw in sub-forums and you have better specificity in the threads.
What types of forums are worth creating?
Support forums are a go-to, especially for a brand that wishes to provide customer support or foster customer-to-customer engagement. Some micro-niche forums might also still do well.
Broad topic forums will seriously struggle although there are the Reddits and Quoras (which are heavily funded by the way), that are general forums and have integrated social elements which worked for them. There’s, of course, the debate of how replies should be handled in forums: quoted vs embedded replies. Embedded replies bury replies and make them really hard to find. Although quoted replies result in duplicate posts, it gives a more linear structure to the discussion, making it really difficult to miss replies.
Conclusion
Podcasting used to be a big deal a while back until it lost popularity. Guess what, it has staged a comeback (often in video format). I believe forums will stage a comeback. I don’t know what would change when that happens, but I’m very certain forums will stage a comeback.
A forum remains a powerful tool for your customer/user engagement if used correctly.