What’s a Forum and What Can it Do For You?

Forums aren’t just for teenagers looking to talk to other people for their love of dragons, Twilight or Pokémon anymore. Forums, dependent on your industry, allow for customers to comment, discuss and ask each other questions. Forums can be incredibly helpful if you know how to properly navigate them.

Forums are largely a place for customers within an industry to share their love, ask questions, post news, and more. Companies tend to steer clear because it can be tempting to respond in a selling manner to the customers of competitors or people who may complain. This is not what forums are for and, in many cases, you can be kicked off by the forum administrator. If you work for a company and are considering joining a forum within your industry you are going to need to hold off on advertising your product/service and not respond to negativity. What you should be doing on these forums is more asking questions to gain better insight, commenting on posts and not aggressively selling your product/service. Customers don’t want to feel like they are getting sold to every time they move an inch and forums provide the escape from that.

When joining a forum, always make sure it is within your target industry. If at all possible, look around at the posts – are people posting regularly? What do they tend to post? If it’s spam postings, you may want to steer clear because it may be a waste of your time. If people aren’t posting frequently enough, you may also want to stay away and find one where people are more active. If you want to advertise, can you? How do you go about doing that? Can you interact with customers in a messaging format? Many forums (for products, at least) have product sections that post for sale ads – can you reach out to a customer and potentially make a sale without posting it in the comment box where it may get ignored? You want to make sure the forum is worth your while before you begin to sign up.

Forums: Your Best Friend or Your Worst Enemy

 Why are forums important? Forums are where your potential customers are asking questions and getting answers from other people like them. Businesses do not use forums largely unless they are company run but forums can be your best friend – you can comment on posts and ask questions in order to get a better perspective on what is going on in your industry. Industry insight is crucial to success, and while there are countless companies that you can pay to give you industry insight that is quantifiable. But if you are cold calling customers regularly, industry insight can be more valuable if you are seeing directly what people are saying. Forums provide that direct insight – forums allow people to express opinion and insight, which helps you in selling. Are customers upset over new laws? How can your company help them? Is there new equipment out that people want more information on? Give them that insight and talk to them about how issues are getting fixed or not and what can be done to help people in the industry.

 But forums can be tricky too. When posting on forums, you must be careful of not posting advertisements or sounding like you are selling. When signing up for a forum, many companies will not only include in the Agreement Terms that most people just click agree to, that you cannot advertise without paying upfront or advertise at all. This is to protect the community from being sold to so they can be as honest as possible as well as not leave the community due to unwarranted advertisements. When signing up for a forum, some companies may ask a bit about your company and if the description sounds like you are trying to sell to posters, then they will not even let you on the forum. Be aware of this and try to use the forum not as a selling outlet but more as an industry insight.

 Participating on forums should be kept more to commenting on how to fix something, asking questions and gaining answers in order to better understand the industries you sell in. Just be careful and be aware of what you are posting on the forums.