10 Differences between Chat and Forum based Communities

Chat Based Communities

Forum Based communities

Your conversations get lost

Becomes your place for content and conversation repository

Not Scalable

Forums are highly scalable

Becomes an intrusive medium

Forums addresses questions to all but it is not as intrusive as chat due to its threaded structure

Engagement drops and is short lived

Engagement is not time bound. A thread shared 2 years ago can come up in search and people could discover and still share comments

Not a highly support friendly, looks like a place to lodge complaint and also identifying and solving problems take time

Becomes a great tool for support purpose and identifying problems are quick

Can be a great communication channel

Forums are a great tool to discuss, share opinions

Open rates and drop off from groups can be more

Open rates can be lesser than chat communities but drop offs are negligible. They still be an observer or community lurker

Idea of community diminishes when more DM or personal chat gets involved

You can network with users by following them, discovering them or mentioning them

Getting insights become a big time hassle

With content segregation system coming in-built and search being humungous, it becomes easy to look for insights

Discoverability is minimal or null

A great tool that makes discovery easier and helps with organic SEO due to UGC (User generated conversations/ content)