The ways that active forum users are different than the general Internet population can be summarized in two characteristics: engagement and influence. In the age of social media these are two key metrics that marketers are trying to grow for their products. Therefore they should sit-up and take notice at some fascinating attributes of forum members, gleaned from a Post-Release/Synovate report published in 2010. The report concluded that forum-users are:
- 3.5 times more likely to proactively recommend a particular purchase to someone else.
- 3.5 times more likely to share links about new products.
- 4 times more likely to post online ratings and reviews.
- 2 times as likely to share advice – offline and in person – based on information they’ve read online.
Forum members are also much more open to discussing specific products and services. In fact, many forums are built up around that intent. If you look at this recent post from CarTalk, you see forum members specifically discussing Dodge’s new DART vehicle and relating it to the vehicle’s history, or this one where they discuss the pros and cons of different vehicle brands.
Not only are forum participants likely to be engaged and influential on the forums themselves, but they also self-publish and organize events. 20.6% of forum participants have a blog versus 2.1% of the general Internet population, according to the Post-Release/Synovate study. And 18.8% take an active role in organizing an offline event or meetup for a group that met originally online versus 2.4% of the general Internet population.
If you are looking for engaged and influential people to build a powerful word-of-mouth marketing engine then active forum participants should be part of your reach strategy.
Discussion forums are based around conversations. They are typically open discussions started around a topic and category and continued openly among members that have access to that particular category. They are like the commons or quad at a university. While each member has their own identity and identifiers, the activity happens in the common area – the category and topic of discussion. This differs from a social network like Facebook in that most of the activity happens on each individual’s home or profile page rather than a common community area.
To be fair, Facebook has worked hard to make your homepage work like a forum by showing you relevant posts from other people in your homepage timeline. Previous social networks like Myspace were geared more to everything happening on your homepage or someone else’s profile page. Still though, we can say that social networking platforms like Facebook and messaging platforms like Twitter focus more on what different individuals are saying or doing vs the group community conversations that are the foundation of all activity in the forums.
A post in a forum also differs from other social networking platforms in that there are much larger limits on post size and they have additional optional features such as text markup, file uploads including inline picture additions and commenting, ability to post programming code snippets, and the like. In terms of the available features in their creation, forum posts are more like member blog posts that follow one after the other in a logical stream.
Because forums are created with conversations in mind, they are structured to make those conversations easy to locate and participate in. They are structured therefore with a defined category – topic structure for easy access to groups of conversations or comments about a specific topic. On Facebook you can’t do a search for or even find a link to all conversations about ‘XBOX 360 games’. On a Forum, you could access this through the category structure in seconds. If you want to access a conversation about a particular game, someone has probably already started one, so you can go there and join in. If not, you can start one yourself and other members will join in the conversation. The structure has been optimised to create and maintain active conversations.
The structure is further optimized to help people find discussions who aren’t yet members. Discussions have their own link structure to make them searchable/findable through search engines. Many large forums have literally millions of links that match to very specific keywords and these are a major source of traffic and new members over time.
There are three main types of members: administrators, moderators and members. Administrators have control over all aspects of a forum, including technical aspects and design. Moderators will typically have more limited administrative privileges mostly related to managing content, but in some cases also providing limited user management. Members are provided the ability to view and post content. There may be restrictions on what they can post or what types of images or signatures they can add to their profiles until they have established themselves as good actors in the forum. This gets into the concept of Roles and Permissions, which provide for exacting member roles to fit different scenarios. For example, a forum administrator may create different member roles to view and/or post to different categories or sub-forums in the forum. There could be special categories available only to paid member roles for instance.
Connections between members typically happen at the conversation or common-interest level. Members can follow a particular discussion by bookmarking it to be notified whenever there is a new comment. They might also follow another member to be notified whenever they create a new discussion or comment on an existing one. Where they wish to make a 1-to-1 connection, they will typically do it through the private messaging system.
That concludes the brief overview of what makes up a discussion forum. In the next post I will cover information related to the size of the audience for forums.
This is intended to be a seven-part series with the following parts:
- What makes up a discussion forum?
- How big is the audience for forums?
- How are forum members unique vs the general Internet population?
- How can marketers create their own forum?
- Where does a forum fit in an overall community strategy?
- What are the opportunities for marketing through external forums?
- What are some of the best practices by successful forum marketers?
Check out our guest post today on AllFacebook.com - 7 Reasons To Add A Chat Forum To Your Facebook Page.
If you want more info on doing this with Vanilla you can have a look at our previous post on Embedding a Vanilla Forum In A Facebook Page or drop us a line.
If you work around forums and communities long enough, it’s easy to begin to believe that everyone knows what constitutes a discussion forum, how that fits into a community, what differentiates an active forum user from the general population and how to tap into the power of some the bigger forums. In my experience, this rarely turns out to be the case. I therefore thought I’d kick-off the New Year by creating a guide for marketers wanting to get an overview of forums in general and how they can be leveraged to accomplish general marketing goals.
This is intended to be a seven-part series with the following parts:
- What makes up a discussion forum?
- How big is the audience for forums?
- How are forum members unique vs the general Internet population?
- How can marketers create their own forum?
- Where does a forum fit in an overall community strategy?
- What are the opportunities for marketing through external forums?
- What are some of the best practices by successful forum marketers?
If you think more should be covered, pipe up! Otherwise, stay tuned…
In previous posts we have discussed the implications and process of moving or changing from an existing forum platform over to Vanilla Forums. This post deals specifically with implications for large, mature forums.
There are many reasons a large forum will regularly consider making a platform switch, among them: monthly hosting costs, scaling issues, load times, bugs, design and functionality stagnation, manageability and general loss of members to social networks.
Like any other existing forum there are concerns that give pause not to do it, in this case more pronounced. Many of these forums have millions of SEO links that need to be preserved. They have thousands of members and hundreds of moderators who are reasonably happy with the way things are. And they have programmed exacting functions and features that are unique to their site and overall user experience.
At Vanilla we’ve worked very hard to address these concerns and built our migration system and processes to provide the necessary solutions. We have a 301-redirect system as part of our custom imports that preserve all of the SEO links. We are aware of the psychology involved in making the switch from an old way of doing things to a new way of doing things and can work with a forum owner to both prepare member communication prior to the switch and work with their members post-switch to address any concerns or questions. We work with forum owners to help create a user experience that meshes the best of the old and best options of the new. And we have a project team at the ready that provide custom work to match or enhance the functions and features of the previous site that made the member experience unique.
We’ve also worked very hard to provide the best hosting platform for large communities. Our scaling model allows us to handle rapid increases in load in a snap. It also allows us to provide transparent utility-based pricing for our largest customers. To give an example, a large customer running a forum that has 20 million page views a month pays $3,949.00 per month under our Large Community pricing plan and this monthly bill is increased/decreased based on a transparent CPM (cost-per-thousand pv’s) model. To talk to a Large Community specialist, get more information on our pricing plan and/or discuss your unique situation, you can contact us directly at 855-836-7867 or contact us here.
Because we host only our software we are always able to optimize and re-optimize the hosting environment and the software to provide the best possible service. We have exposure to sites across all of our hosting customers and self-hosted forum owners that help to educate us on many different use cases and scenarios.
While other hosted products exist in the market, those that are comparable in product breadth, flexibility and hosting environment cost several multiples more for the same service. And those don’t have an open-source community of over 500,000 sites also programming on the platform. Therefore if you are looking for all the benefits of a premier hosting and software platform for your existing large forum, with all of the opportunities that go with that, and are also looking for the best value for dollar spent, then you should definitely explore the possibilities with us of making a move.
We are big believers in the importance of forums in conversation and social marketing. We think they should be given their due and we are working to create solutions to help them both differentiate themselves from and integrate with the more general social networks. We believe the best days for forums are yet to come and want to play an important role in getting us there.
One of the questions I sometimes get asked by customers is why go with one of our commercial hosting plans (www.vanillaforums.com) when they can download the DIY-version and “host themselves”? My answer depends really on who I’m talking to. Usually (almost all the time) though I’m talking to a customer who is looking to have a public-facing forum for their customers or members. Even if it is a private forum, if it is being seen by the public it is a public-facing site. In that situation you need to look at what the cost would be if something went wrong (e.g. the site slowed down to a crawl or stopped working entirely). If you are using the forum to do support, answer questions and help your customers help each other out, how’s it going to look if that suddenly stops working or has an embarrassing bug on it? It’s not going to look good that’s what, and you are going to scramble to fix it at all costs, and by scramble I mean pay through the nose, either in your own internal time, the cost of external help or both. And let’s not forget the hit on your reputation.
The thing we learned through the years of supporting Vanilla is that 99/100 the problem is with the hosting environment, which is why we created the VanillaForums.com commercial hosting service, so that we could take care of the hosting, scaling and making sure all the moving parts work smoothly together, and you take care of growing and nurturing your community. With a forum there are a lot of moving parts, which makes it quite different from hosting something simple like a blog or a bunch of website files. And we get to cheat, we design our hosting environment for only one application, Vanilla Forums software, and we make the software so we know how it works intimately. As a result we can optimize the environment for that task and build in some advanced applications that are only available on that environment. We can’t make those available on the self-hosted because we’d need to design it to work on all hosts (including really crappy ones) instead of just on our proprietary hosting platform. It also means that we know how to add new plugins or addons that you request without messing up the whole system. We know how to test addons for security and stability before they get added.
Which gets back to the question of why sign-up for one of our monthly service plans when you can download the software to “self-host”. In short, because you want to avoid being “penny wise, pound foolish” (or penny wise, dollar foolish). While it may be enticing for some to feel they have save a few bucks a month on hosting, you are getting a lot more than simple hosting with our plans, and it won’t take long when something goes wrong on a self-hosted environment for you to eat up and surpass $149 or $549 a month. When you sign-up for a service plan you are buying a predictable monthly cost and peace of mind that everything will work as it should. That way you can focus on building your community, not on becoming a forum hosting expert.
These days the pace of change in every market is so fast that you can only really become expert at a very few things. Does it make sense for you to become an expert at hosting forums? No. Does it make sense to become an expert and growing and managing communities? Absolutely, yes. That is a skill that is valuable to you and any company you are with. It’s a skill that makes sense for you to have. Unless you work for a forum software company, being an expert at forum hosting is not a repeatable skill. So put your focus where you can create the highest value and leave the rest to us. We’ll make you very happy that you did.
We recently completed the following report: “10 Ways Having A Customer Forum Is Different From Having A Facebook or Twitter Page“. You can download the full report here. We are not suggesting that you don’t have a Facebook or Twitter page, you should, but this report shows how important it is to create a central hub to pull together your external community ecosystem and take advantage of features and benefits that only a forum can provide.
In it we cover what kind of customer and member information you have access to through a forum that you don’t get with Facebook or Twitter. We discuss the things you control and own with a forum vs a third-party site. For example, with your own forum you own the data, have complete control of the visual design, and can decide what, if any, advertising appears on the forum (e.g. calls to action for your products). We also discuss specialized customer experience and support features such as product Single-Sign-On and e-mail integration that you don’t get with sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. And we discuss both the SEO implications for public sites and the ability to manage different levels of access and member types for both public and private forums.
Enjoy the report!
Recently Vanilla Forums released an updated version of the Community Analytics available with our Enterprise package. The goal was to provide insight on the overall community health trends in your customer community. The Enterprise Analytics suite tracks four main areas: Traffic, Users/Community, Content, and Q&A.
Traffic
Within traffic, the following statistics are tracked: Page Views, Visits, Visits per User, and Time On Site. Page Views are broken down by Guests, Users, and Searches. Visits, Visits per User and Time On Site are all broken down by Guests, Members and Moderators. Traffic is in general a metric of the level of awareness or reach of the community. Time On Site you can also regard as an engagement metric.
Users / Community
Within the users / community section we track activity by: New Users, Active Users (Unique Visits), and Contributing Users. The users / community is segmented by Guests, Members and Moderators and is generally an active membership metric.
Content
The content section of the analytics package tracks Discussions, Comments, and Users Per Discussion (Thread). Since content can only be posted by either members or moderators, this section is segmented between those two only. Content is considered an engagement metric.
Q&A
The Q&A section applies to those customer communities that want to track the # of times customers ask questions, how many answers there are, how many accepted answers there are, and the average time it takes a question to be answered. This is great for measuring the level of responsiveness to questions in the forum, both from internal staff and from the general community. Q&A is considered a specialized support or responsiveness metric.
You can also relate the Q&A as a financial metric. For instance, if you know that a direct phone or e-mail support request costs you on average x (let’s say $50) and that a re-usable community support answer costs you on average y (let’s say $5), then you can calculate the financial return (ROI) of your total community support answers for the month (z) as: ROI = z*(x-y). So if you had 350 community answers in a month, your ROI for the month would be 350*(50-5) = $15,750.00.
Sign-up now for a 30-day trial of Vanilla Forums Enterprise with Community Analytics
There’s a great article today about Vanilla’s Customer Forums products and strategy in IT World Canada. The author JD Speedy has done a great job of zeroing in on the unique value that Vanilla offers. Special thanks to Rick Burnes from Hubspot for doing an absolutely amazing job of communicating the value of Vanilla. If you are a customer of Vanilla and would like to share your thoughts, please feel free to comment on that article, we’d love to see it. Link to your forum while you are at it.
You can view the article here: http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/canadian-software-company-improves-on-the-internet-forum/144307
We are pleased and honoured to announce that Vanilla Forums has been named as one of the Top 20 Innovative Companies in Canada by the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX). The announcement was made this morning at the opening bell of the Toronto Stock Exchange. You can get more info on the CIX Top 20 here, you can see the Vanilla Forums CIX info page here, and a list of the Top 20 here.
Attendees of the CIX will be trading virtual shares in the Top 20 companies as part of the lead-up to the actual event. If you would like to take part as an attendee of the CIX event (taking place at the Mars Discovery District on December 1, 2011), you can sign-up here.
