Picking up the slack with community forums

Real-time messaging, groups and forums aren’t mutually exclusive; they’re complementary.

Building on our key reasons communities should use forums, we look at how they enhance where they already communicate elsewhere.

Slack and real-time messaging platforms like it are de rigueur for communication amongst teams and Facebook is the go-to solution for groups. However community managers should consider whether these platforms are enough when shaping the places where their growing communities meet. Here’s when forums should be part of the conversation:

Slack and lively Facebook Groups are perfect places for topics that are immediately relevant, a reason why the former is so popular in the workplace. They are great for getting a “quick answer” from the collective experience of the community within 24 hours. After that it inevitably gets swallowed up in the feed and can’t easily be searched or referenced.

With forums discussions can unfold over days, weeks, even years. This is valuable for persistent topics as they’re more easily searched (avoiding unnecessary repetition); provide context for new members; and allow longer-form responses and cross-referencing to related conversations happening elsewhere on the forum. New members can benefit from (and contribute to) discussions started long before they joined by members that may no longer be part of the community.

Discussions naturally converge and diverge, especially with multiple conversations happening at the same time. This can make them difficult to follow on Slack and Facebook. And while Slack offers multiple channels and threads to organise conversations, by their design these platforms still limit the quantity of topics that can be discussed at any given moment.

The structure of forums, in contrast, encourage simultaneous discussion across an infinite number of topics. Like conversations in real-time messaging, tangents are still commonplace in forums which is why they allow members to easily move entire discussions to new topics so these segues can continue to develop in their own right.

Slack and Facebook Groups are ideal for small, engaged groups who share common challenges, needs, resources and ideas. This intimate real-time conversation begins to lose value when the community grows: the discussion becomes so diverse that it is no longer relevant to all members; and the feed becomes saturated with new topics making it impossible to keep up.

Forums categorise and tag discussions and build up an information hub over time which members can browse at their convenience. This is why, as we posted last week, public forums are so good at increasing SEO. Members can also subscribe and unsubscribe from topics to only receive notifications on what’s relevant to them.

So how can forums, real-time messaging and social groups work together?

The answers to quick Slack or Facebook Group questions may exist on the forum which another member can link to; and vice-versa, new posts or interesting developments in older topics on the forum can be shared in the right social or chat channel to drive community engagement. It’s not about replacing one for another but rather establishing the best places for your community to converse, as it grows and matures, to ensure its continued value proposition and longevity.

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