Are forums and blogs losing importance due to the increase of social media?

[freeflow]

I have a gut feeling that this is happening. Do you know of any statistics or researches to confirm this? What are your opinions?

 

[m2weblogs]

I think the bigger networks like Facebook and such are pulling a lot of the people away. At least from forums...

 

[VideoWhisper.com]

Forums and blogs can be present on social networks. People share posts and articles with their friends.

The ones who are loosing market share are probably search engines and directories because people start browsing based on social suggestions.

 

[m2weblogs]

Next thing is implementing some search engine into Facebook !

 

[GILSAN]

I certainly hope not, but I have a feeling they are.

 

[DU]

If it didn't have importance before it still doesn't.

It depends on who and what. If an influential person writes a blog with opinion it will always be important. If someone neatly captures data it will be important. If it just repeats what has already happened it will go away- but who will notice?

---------- Post added at 06:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:06 PM ----------

Nice Poll by the way.

 

[WebIntellects - Rob]

Forums are still useful, however they have certain losses caused by social media, but for now it is too early to say if they are to stop development.

 

[Dirky47]

Forums and blogs are still useful. Actually as SEO, they are my most favorite tasks to do. They give traffic, and backlinks also at the same time. In addition to that, you are continuously learning in forum discussions.

 

[SiberForum]

Forums are usually more specific and there are more qualifies members at forums. Also SEO purposes, for sure.

 

[f2k83]

I think forums have a chance to make a comeback BECAUSE of social media sites. People will start to desire longer forms of public conversation and forums will undoubtedly be apped out into social media .. literally or figuratively. Just my two cents.

 

[scithe]

MySpace would have survived were they only willing to put in the effort to fix their forum groups. The spam there was horrible compared to facebook, but there were some growing and blossoming communities in the MySpace groups. Unfortunately the forums were buggy and after so many years they got worse and people started giving up.

I just don't see namepros's vbulletin forum being moved into the background while we all spam the namepro fanpage wall.

Tiny communities may thrive on the backends of social networks though.

 

[Domagon]

Newsgroups were far superior to web forums in many regards, but lacked glitz and editorial control, and hence fell to the wayside. With that said, web forums still beat Facebook's discussion plug-in abomination.

However, social network discussion systems, despite being so lousy, are appealing to many because they're so integrated with ease of posting without extra registration steps.

Other reasons for some web forums losing traffic / less activity is due to the forum software being overly-complex with too many features, and non-standardized compared to that of a social network discussion system.

Rambling on, but anyways, imho, web based forums will remain popular well into the future. But there will be much forum consolidation, and with many of them running on a social network discussion framework.

Ron