When Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady recently announced he was leaving New England, he did so by utilizing his personal Social Media account. Why? Because if you are one person looking to share a message with thousands or even millions of people all at once, platforms like Twitter are generally the way to go, assuming of course you have millions of followers… and there is the rub. What about everyone else?
A Forum is a Thousand Voices Strong
Online forums have come a long way since the early ages of the internet. While many forum niches have come and gone, a few have stood the test of time and remain hugely popular today in certain niches, perhaps most widely by Sports Fans. In example, look at the Bucs Forum Receiving thousands of hits and maintaining an active following year after year, they have been able to stay relevant and even thrive in 2020.
In fact, forums that center largely around team sports make up over 30% of all active communities on the internet today!
What makes an online fan forum like Buczone great, is the flexibility in allowing their members to discover and discuss topics that are relevant to them. Members are encouraged to engage in conversation with friends and fellow fans and they may do so quite easily because of how how these sites tend to be structured.
In large part, it is due to their structure that they can cover so many different subjects and various interests (even those that fall outside of the scope of the main theme for that community), while maintaining a well-organized user-friendly layout. This structure really encourages members to engage in separate discussions, through the use of these “sub-forums”, which in turn nurtures that community.
Forums grow relationships with likeminded people
As opposed to having their sports news pushed to them one tweet at a time by whomever has the most “followers”, sports fans are able to share their lives with fellow fans and grow close to one another, even when they live thousands of miles apart. All of this ultimately brings people together, through longform content sharing, in ways that Twitter can struggle to accomplish, due to its functionality.
Ultimately, it is for all of those reasons, even in this day and age of Twitter popularity, in a time where a quarterback superstar like Tom Brady chooses to “tweet” a major news announcement, that forums are still so extensively relied upon by sports fans around the world. For them, it’s about being heard by those you want to hear you, not about being Facebook Famous.