What are discussions?
Discussions are conversations that take place online between community members, peers, employees, and even students. These conversations can be about any subject matter or discuss any issue amongst various members of the same, or similar, communities.
Discussions are important for any business looking to create a dedicated digital community around its product or service. Through online communities, discussions allow members to share their thoughts, concerns, product ideas, and even answers to other members’ questions. They help create a sense of community and camaraderie among users.
Online community management software that supports discussions between members spans nearly every industry, from local organizations to global enterprise software. Companies that use this software typically have employees dedicated to moderating these communities.
There’s often a significant increase in customer engagement and brand dedication as a result of productive discussion through these platforms.
Effective discussions can be a valuable resource for all teams because they help identify:
- Support tickets
- Customer satisfaction scores
- Common troubleshooting problems
- Popular product feature requests
- Communication on new and retiring features
- Marketing content ideas
- Loyal brand and product influencers
Types of discussions
Online discussion doesn’t always mean messaging in a web-based digital forum. Below are the four types of platforms that anyone can use to facilitate effective discussions:
- Slack community: Particularly used in the B2B/B2C technology space, Slack communities are a great way to provide a discussion forum for free for everyone, including the business that uses it. It’s easy to dedicate different channels to different topics and vet potential members of the community.
- Advocacy program: Often limited to the most loyal users of a product, an advocacy program provides both a place for users to discuss certain topics and a reward system for introducing new users to the product and business. Think of an advocacy program as an extension of the business’ sales team.
- Digital forum: Usually hosted in a web browser, these digital forums are similar to message boards where community members either post new topics or comment on existing topics. Typically, anyone with a login to the forum or the product has access.
- Discord server: Particularly used in the education and gaming spaces, Discord servers are similar to Slack communities in that it’s possible to create multiple channels and threads related to different topics and control who joins the community.
Benefits of discussions
The proliferation of asynchronous communication and social media have partially led to the success of online communities and discussions. Many businesses find benefits and success when it comes to hosting online discussions.
These benefits include:
- Better and more readily available support to customers
- The ability to elevate the voice of the customer
- Relevant information delivered to everyone at the same time
- A centralized location for questions and answers
- The development of a global community
- The creation and nurturing of brand and product experts and ambassadors
- The customer support team expands to the entire user base, as active discussion members often crowdsource answers to common questions
The challenges of discussions
Unfortunately, online discussions in communities aren’t always positive or easy to facilitate. Some of the challenges of moderating and running discussions are:
- Written communication vs. spoken communication: Often, written communication loses much of the nuance and inflection of spoken communication. This has the potential to cause confusion and arguments among discussion participants. When communicating in a discussion on a digital platform, participants must remember to be clear, concise, and kind.
- Conflicting opinions: Especially with regards to divisive topics, conflicting opinions can and do occur between customers and employees.
- Incessant conversations: Certain topics appear over and over again in online discussions, whether it’s a support issue, a desired product feature, or some other consumer problem. These comments often end up with threads or discussions unrelated to the topic at hand.
- Spamming: Spam in a digital platform for discussion comes in many forms. Someone may join the community to spam every channel or thread with their business. They might make phishing or baiting attempts, or even post nonsensical or inappropriate comments.
Discussion leaders and moderators need to be on the lookout for the above issues and respond, delete, or close certain comments. They should also establish the authority to remove or ban certain users that prove to be repeat offenders.
Discussions vs. forums vs. threads
A discussion can be between any two or more people and allows for communication between a business and its customers and users. It is an open line of communication about any specific or relevant topic.
A forum is a centralized location where the discussions are hosted. Hosting discussions on a digital forum of some kind allows for communication between people in different time zones, so contributors can respond when they are available.
A thread is a conversation on a specific discussion topic. When a conversation is threaded, anyone can see a series of messages related to one question or article. Responses to a thread are nested under the original comment, post, or question.
Whitney Rudeseal Peet
Whitney Rudeseal Peet is a former freelance writer for G2 and a story- and customer-centered writer, marketer, and strategist. She fully leans into the gig-based world, also working as a voice over artist and book editor. Before going freelance full-time, Whitney worked in content and email marketing for Calendly, Salesforce, and Litmus, among others. When she's not at her desk, you can find her reading a good book, listening to Elton John and Linkin Park, enjoying some craft beer, or planning her next trip to London.
