It (almost) goes without saying that social media and social networking are essential aspects of a solid marketing campaign. You need to meet users where they are and give them ways to both engage with you and to engage with each other. It can be easy to forget that internet users have communicated with those sharing similar interests since long before Facebook or Myspace existed. Despite the popularity of social networking sites, the classic web based forum is still an extremely important and functional tool allowing the creation of communities for your users with even more appeal than a trip to Facebook.

“Forums”, or threaded and categorized discussion systems, existed in one form or another even before the web itself did. Dating back to the 1980’s, there was a discussion system on the internet that was popular and widely used: Usenet Newsgroups. The Usenet featured the ability to post and read posts by other users within categories tied to mutual interests. All posts were displayed sequentially until software was created which would display the posts in the threaded manner we have become more accustomed to.

With the popularity of the web, this functionality was recreated there and has been a mainstay on community driven, common interest sites ever since. Even as popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have offered up threaded discussion systems for their users, they have not caught on the way that forums on websites devoted to a given product or topic have.

There are a few reasons for this, but the official manufacturer website for a product can offer more than just the ability to interact with other users of the product. For example, the Janome Forum is located on the same site as tons of sewing project ideas, downloads, stitches, software updates, and manuals for Janome’s sewing machines. The Dell Community Forums are located in a similar place on their site to where you can find driver downloads or links to manual PDFs. If you have an issue or question about a product, the official site is more likely to be a one stop shop for fixing it, not only through the forum, but through other available resources.

Another benefit to web-based forums over forums on social networking sites is that the companies who run the forums have a presence on them. On the Adobe forums, you can post a question about a product or discuss a bug and receive assistance not only from the user community, but from employed support specialists on staff at Adobe who are there to help serve the user community in this capacity. This can be a great way to get help quickly and directly from the people who know the product the most. It’s less likely to find these people monitoring the discussion groups on social networking sites.

Web forums also offer the ability to archive posts indefinitely and allow searching of these archives. On social networking sites, the discussion functionality removes old threads from the archives (and sometimes does not even allow for searching of current threads) over time making it more difficult to find a response to your question.

Lastly, you cannot underestimate the importance of the users themselves. On an official forum, there is a higher level of accountability. Forum software provides information on which users have the highest number of posts and even allow you to see a full list of posts by a given user. If you have had a question answered by a friendly fellow user and want to see what else they have written, this is a very simple process. Web forums are often moderated by users who the community has deemed to be knowledgeable on the subject, and so the discussions are more relevant and on topic. The cleanliness of a forum makes it easier to navigate to what you are looking for quickly.