Discord, Twitter, Telegram, TikTok, Twitch, Facebook Groups and Slack are some well-known community platforms to consider for hosting your online community. Such sites are ideal for building loyal online communities that boost business and influence. These platforms have some nuance in terms of the kind of content they support, the features they offer, and the audiences they are most popular with. Below, we discuss the differences to help you decide where the best place for you to share content and interact with users and fans.
Discord is the primary platform to host online communities and has a huge popularity amongst gaming and web3 projects. The platform is custom built for community, meaning many people can interact simultaneously on different topics, across different channels. Discord supports many media channels from text to audio, and has an ecosystem of bots and tools, like Blaze, which make management of very large communities of tens of thousands of users possible.
Each server is segregated into topic-based channels. One can jump on a voice-based channel and get spotted by friends who can instantly pop in for a conversation without even calling. Groups can be private or public, and users share content, hang out, or start their own community with a smooth text and voice/video interface.
Twitter is leveraged by millions of businesses worldwide. Viral Twitter marketing spreads a message far and wide in minimal time, adding to the popularity of the platform. Twitter supports one-to-many content best, with each brand putting out their own short form text content, which others can respond to and share. The content put out has a bite-sized nature, making it easier to consume. The tweeted and retweeted thoughts can weave through global communities and get the word out quickly. The audience on twitter skews more millennial and male.
Telegram is a good fit for large communities, and also offers a secret chatting feature that uses encryption. Telegram, like WhatsApp, has only one channel per community. Unlike WhatsApp, Telegram can support tens of thousands of users.
Telegram is known to be more secure than Whatsapp. however, Whatsapp actually has more secure encryption practices, with end to end encryption being the default for all communications not just secret chats. The downside of WhatsApp is that Meta, its parent company, has access to WhatsApp data which keeps track os users’ location and habits.These T&Cs alongside the limitation in community size, has led Telegram to take over from Whatsapp for crypto and privacy sensitive audiences. Similar to Discord, Telegram also has an ecosystem of bots and automations which make management of large Telegram communities easier.
TikTok thrives on short, catchy videos, and is a relatively newer platform with an audience that skews more Gen-Z. The platform focuses mostly on one to many content, where a business or creator can post a short video to their community of followers, users or fans. Their community can then respond and interact with this content. TikTok has recently gained huge popularity due to it's interest-based algorithm which allows great content to be discovered by new audiences.
Similar to TikTok and Twitter, Twitch focuses on one-to-many content, with the primary use case being a creator or streamer publishing live video content to their fanbase. The audience on Twitch skews heavy on gamers, given a significant part of its content on the platform is live streams of games or tutorials. A live stream may include the following:
Facebook groups are another form of community that brings people together. There is no limit on the number of members that can be part of a group, and a person can join many groups. The audience on Facebook skews Millennial.
Facebook groups are often popular with brands who target millennial audiences. They support many-to-many communications, and allow users to connect with one another easily. Other times, they are used simply to build brand awareness for businesses. Facebook provides features like notifications, scheduled posts, and insights.
Slack is a messaging application that makes work-related communication simpler. Both in-person and remote teams can come together as a Slack community. It helps in better coordination among employees. Slack has collaboration tools to improve workplace communication. Some external communities also exist on Slack, but it's biggest use case is internal collaboration.
If you're unsure which platform is right for you, schedule a demo with Blaze and we can help advise: https://calendly.com/blaze-ai/demo.
Our platform integrates with Discord, Twitter and Telegram with more community channels coming soon!
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