Community Chat

What is Community Chat?

Community chat is a live social tool which allows users to interact with one another in real time. It is different from other chat experiences, like a traditional private messenger, in that it is intended to support large-scale, public, or semi-public interaction between users who share a common interest in the content they are consuming.

Community Chat vs. Group Chat & Live Support

There are many types of chat interfaces, which can be difficult to tell apart, but they have different technical and functional requirements.
Group Chat / Messenger: This is used for private communication between people who, in most cases, already know one another. It is not suitable to handle “burst” traffic, and aim for another goal—private communication, without increasing the number of participants.
Live Support Chat: This is used for one-to-one communication between a user and a brand representative. Its primary function is to solve technical issues, not to be social or emotional.
Community Chat: This is used for many-to-many communication, supporting thousands of users concurrently, with very high message rates, measured in thousands of messages per second. The goal is build an engaging space where participants can exchange emotions, ideas, expertise, or opinions. Community chats can suit a political party website or a football club app, so any platform that gathers people with similar interests.

How It Works Inside the Product

In a sports app, it may activate only during a live game and serve as a place for fan chat. In a fintech app, it may attach to specific trading pairs and enable sharing. The advantage of embedded chat over external solutions like Discord or Telegram is that it keeps the user’s focus on your brand. If users leave your app to talk about your brand elsewhere, you lose both their time and their data. Community chat differs from forums: forums are something stable and slow, people are not engaged together, they share their opinion but do not participate in a live discussion. 

Key Community Chat Features

To take a simple text box and turn it into an energetic environment that gets users talking and sharing, several core features and opportunities are necessary:

Scalability: The infrastructure needs to support a suitable number of users. A specific number depends on the volume of your audience.
Moderation: Community chats use advanced multiple moderation tools to prevent hate speech, spam, and scams. Personal data has to be kept safe. Any platform that provides community chats has to follow the policies of the country of operation. For the EU, it is the DSA—Digital Services Act.
Engagement Widgets: To avoid your users getting bored, it is better to give them entertaining bits and bobs, like polls, quizzes, and stickers. Also, you can boost your main business there: for instance, publish marketing offers, and build a bridge between talk and action. 
Translation: Breaking language barriers by enabling a global audience to speak different languages within one single chat room is important not for all countries, but for some markets.
Gamification: Rewarding highly engaged users with exclusive and unique badges and achievements.

The Business Impact: Beyond Just Talking

For product teams, the implementation of community chats is a strategic step to solve various business questions.

Retention and Session Time: Connection is a strong retention driver. Social features can lead to a 10% to 50% increase in session time as users stay to see replies and reactions.

First-Party Data: By owning the conversation, brands can analyse the sentiment and intent of the audience, allowing for a deep understanding of what users love or dislike. These insights can be tracked in real time and provide much information for business growth and product improvement.

Safe Environment: With multi-layer moderation, brands can ensure the social space remains a safe extension of their identity and increase user lifetime value (LTV) and help users feel safe in a trusted space.

Implementing Community Chats

A real-time community chat can be implemented in-house by the business’s development team or with an external provider. Community chat is usually implemented with SDK, webview, API, or iFrame, and the choice depends on the business’s goals and requirements.

Learn more about the difference between building community chats in-house or with a solution provider.