If you’re not sure what the difference is between a forum and a blog, we’ll start by looking at what each does.
What is a forum?
For starters, a forum is a way for members to leave comments and talk to each other. You, as the site owner, will create different areas of the forum, which are the high-level topics. Members can then visit these different areas and create a new thread, which is a conversation. Other members will see the new thread and read the first post, adding their thoughts in new posts.
So a forum is a way for members to start and have conversations. It’s good for your website as members will visit frequently to see what new threads other members have started and post replies to the threads they are commenting on. Your members are generating a lot of comments on the website, which could bring more visitors to your website!
What is a blog?
A blog in the traditional sense starts with you, the site owner, possibly with a team of other authors, writing posts on whatever topic you choose to start writing about.
Members of a blog are readers and can follow your latest writings through email alerts or by viewing your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. This alerts them to the latest posts and they can go directly to the posts that interest them.
Their participation in the blog is to read your posts and if there is a real community feel, they might even leave weird comments. You may want to reply, and sometimes you may get answered.
Where are the same?
The purpose of both a forum and a blog is to keep your visitors coming back again and again and feel like they are part of the website community. Both are tools that build a website community and hopefully customer loyalty. In both, your visitors can leave comments for others to read.
So where are they different?
There is a big fundamental difference between the two features of a website and both can be used together. In a blog, you, the website owner, write a post about whatever you want, and readers can leave simple comments. But in a forum, it’s the readers who start the discussion and it’s very likely that they’ll come back and add more ideas to the topics being discussed. Your involvement as the website owner is probably just to keep an eye on posts and remove inappropriate entries.
So a forum and a blog are tools to make visitors feel like they are a part of your site, keep them interested and come back to find out what is going on, but in a blog you are in full control of the topics being discussed. while in a forum members can start new discussions.
