Bayt.com

Start networking and exchanging professional insights

Register now or log in to join your professional community.

Follow

Is forums age over?

During discussion with my colleagues (community managers) they said; the forums will end soon, because of the emergence of facebook and twitter and other social networking sites. Actually, I see no relation, forum has its own users and social networking too. what do you think?

User Generated Content Facebook Forums Online Community Management Social Networking Sites
user-image
Question added by Mohammad Alrekabat , Head of Content, Community and Customer Care Department , 7awi.com
Date Posted: 2013/01/25
Upvote (1) Views (8) Followers (3) Answers (4) Report Question
Write an Answer
Register now or log in to answer.
Syed Waqas Saghir
by Syed Waqas Saghir , Independent Digital Marketing Consultant , Brainy Bulls

I don't think so, actually the point is both has its own importance and uses.
As Social Network can offer Forum but Forum can't.
This is the main difference thats why most users from all over the world consider both as in different scenarios.
Why Quora is famous? Why MySpace and other Social networks like Hi5, Orkut and other cant famous like Facebook? The Answer Lies Within.
Have a good day.

Mohammad Alrekabat
by Mohammad Alrekabat , Head of Content, Community and Customer Care Department , 7awi.com

@ Syed Yes totally agree with you, both has its own importance and uses.
Also Forums can offer Social Network, The latest version of vBulletin supports Social Network features.

Usman Naeem Khokhar
by Usman Naeem Khokhar , Growth Hacker (Itchy Fingerz) , NetSol Technologies

 

Premise:

I disagree. Forums are here to stay. Despite the emergence of social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter. They are not the real threat to Forums anyway, they have different socializing mechanics. 

If there is a threat to forums (bulletin boards) t is the comment management systems in the market like Disqus, LiveFyre and IntenseDebate.

Facebook Comments is taking a huge chunk of this market but its not attractive, simply because comments can be shown on Facebook only while the above three let you share across a multitude of social networks.

 

Coming back to my answer:

The market dominators in the forum space are PhpBB, IPB and how can we forget vBulletin.

 

The reasons why they will not die and still evolving:

  1. Tremendous ability to be customized with a huge open-source community. 
  2. A lot of the bootleg market still uses Forums to build their communities. Its a multibillion dollar industry and have billions of users. Piracy in China is at91% (according to Privacy panel discussion at Abu Dhabi Media Summit2014).
  3. Customer Support professionals usually host their discussions on forums.
  4. Huge gamer communities are built on forums and that is an industry over100 billion (2014).
  5. vBulletin and iPB now support Cloud, which increases their customer appeal.
  6. Light-weight on servers even more than WordPress.

Nada Qureshi
by Nada Qureshi , Digital Marketing , Kcal Healthy Fast Food

Not yet over in the Arab world, but it's definitely dying. Even Arabs now have shifted to Instagram, but I still see a lot of activity when it comes to user reviews on product forums.

Write Your Answer
More Questions Like This