Forum Users Are More Engaged Both Online And Offline

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In marketing, marketers do as much as possible to get people talking about a particular brand. In this day and age, there’s a trend where most will gravitate towards social networking platforms. Even though it’s still under the category of New Media, most people tend to overlook the other platforms encompassed under the term New Media; online forums for example.

A recent survey conducted by PostRelease, showed that people who contribute to online forums are “overwhelmingly more engaged” in influential activities – both online and offline – compared to people who don’t use the forums.

These same people are 10 times more likely than non-contributors to publish a blog and are 9 times more likely to take an active role in organizing an offline event or meetup for a group that was originally formed online.

Online forum contributors too are 3.5 times more likely to recommend a particular purchase to someone else, 3.5 times more likely to share links about new products and 4 times more likely to post online ratings and reviews.

Here’s a truncated version of the results:

- 79.2% of forum contributors are part of the decision making process of friends and families prior to making a product purchase; compared to 47.6% of non-contributors

- 65% of forum contributors share advice (offline and in person) based on information that they’ve read online; compared to 35% of non-contributors

- 20.6% of forum contributors publish a blog; compared to 2.1% of non-contributors

To view the rest of the results, check out PostRelease.

Do you participate in an online forum? Do share with us if you do, we look forward to hearing from you.