What do you need? A Blog or a Forum?
Planning to develop a community around your business (website) to address different issues or keep the users updated about new product releases or to engage the users to help each other! What is the best possible solution that you may look for!!! A forum or a blog?
A forum serves a lot of purposes:
- The users can interact between themselves and with the owner
- A lot of product or service related problems are solved in this process and the forum acts as an extended version of FAQ page.
- It suggests a lot of transparency in the business process and wins user’s faith easily that ultimately transfers into business
- A forum can retain the existing users as well as it can fetch a lot of new visitors who in future may turn into users
- There is nothing like a forum to understand user’s trend and it offers a lot of suggestions for upgrading your product
A good blog serves a lot of purposes too:
- A blog can provide latest product updates
- Can create a great reader as well as user base
- Can uphold the brand identity of the company
- Pulls a lot of organic visitors who can be directed to the original site
- Helps to keep the website in the news always
- A blog is a better way for successful social communication
- And a lot more
A forum offers a three way communication [user <-> user <-> Service Provider] where as a blog offers a two way communication [Author <-> User]. In a blog, you can control the directions of issues but in forum it is often impossible. The list may move on and on and on. What do you think?