Emerging role of Forums as an Effective Social Media Tool

Forums from being just a place for discussion with groups have reached a place where it acts as one of the effective tools for group communication in social media. With variable features and user friendly technicalities it is a hot favorite for those who look for platforms meant for a specific group.

Quick response, interesting discussions, focus on individual opinions are some of the key utilities that has led to the growth of Forums as an effective social media tool.

Realizing this fact Facebook, Google, Yahoo have come up with features for group communication (e.g Facebook groups, Google groups, Yahoo groups and so on). However, there is difference in just being a part of a particular forum of an application and being a owner/part of a forum application itself.

Try giving a thought to this questions-
Who owns your content? Who holds all the admin rights and managing option? Can you customize? And finally where does your all your content go if say Facebook/Google/Yahoo suddenly pulls up this feature?

If the answer to all of this is negative, the question is are you placing your content in the right place? Perhaps not!

This is where the role of forums as an application is distinctly different from applications where forums is just a part. It is not about putting your valuable content or questions anywhere but where it makes sense to people who value it.

What are the primary advantages?

1. You are the owner of the particular forum.
2. Can retain the admin rights and customization options.
3. “Your brand”, “ Your content”, “Your community” are the priorities.
4. Can make the forum private/public according to your specific needs.
5. Can carry out quality discussion with your target users on a single platforms
6. Can create a forum for your brand/company/community/group (yourbrand.forums.com)
7. Can pull in traffic directly to your site through the content you post.

So what are the best places to get started:

Forums.com : “ As we say from music to Mars, there are too many things perhaps you want to keep track of . Forums.com is an answer to just that”! It is a trendy group communication application where you can share your thoughts, ideas and questions on anything that interests you. It is the ultimate online hotspot for group activites with innumerable features to enhance your community online. Snippets of the features that forums provides you are Subgroups creation, Facilities for tagging gabs( discussion), following them and marking sticky(favorite), Announcing events, Daily Digest Notifications, Uploading files/folders/Images, Pages, Private messages, customization for background/internal pages, SEO optimization facilities and many more upcoming features. The best part is: All the features are currently public and free of cost!

Ning.com: It is a platform where you can create custom social websites. It helps you to build a social destination that further improves community building. You can foster conversations with your community through conversations, comments, questions and a lot more. Ning is a platform used by many organizers, marketers, influencers and activists to create social experiences. However it is completely accessible only to paid entries. It allows for a Risk free 30 days trail after which you can opt for the paid version.

Nabble: Nabble is a simple free forum that comes with other embedded features. Here you start a free forum, maintain archives of mailing list, create photo galleries, newspaper or start a blog. The features are simple and user friendly. It also provides with universal back end facilities. Nabble is mainly known for providing Mailing List archiving. The lists are available and browseable from Nabble website when you seach something on Google. In addition the collection of embedded applications like classic search, user profile, ACL, email notifications, XML feed, moderation, uploading of pictures and files, threading, cataloging and many more make it an interesting tool.

As a group communication platform Forums are not just any social media tool where you post and forget. It is an ongoing process which helps you to connect and gro continuously. Be it content, questions or ideas, you have track of everything that is going on and can add further value to it. It is a place for continuous improvement and upgradations. It just keeps on getting bigger and better with time!

This is a guest post by Nabanita Roy, if you want to guest post here, check out the guidelines.

Image Credit: Dean Meyers