There was a time when chatting in a group simply suggested written text. Back than it was used for mainly fun. What we see today that chat rooms for web sites are back, mostly in the business arena and mainly for community management.
More and more companies and webmasters seems to see the benefit in adding a chat room to their website to manage and engage their community.
This is also backed-up by statistics. Numbers show that chat rooms for web sites lead to an increase in website visitors.
- A further reason to return to the website, up to 45% more than without one.
- Chat rooms in websites make users stay longer, up to 5 minutes more.
- Chat rooms also help to build a community and let users a further reason to return to the website.
EXAMPLE: Try out a live example (WordPress plugin)
In the 90’s, chat rooms meant text chat, But today, chatting is not limited to writing anymore. New HTML5 chat rooms are equipped with various modern options. This is the result of new emerging technologies like WebRTC (new technology by Google), NodeJS and bootstrap. Now you can easily use a chat conversation to:
- Sharing and uploading files, docs, pdf
- Sharing and uploading images
- Selfie – the new trend with web chats
- Sending Audio messages
- Sending Video messages
- Share YouTube videos
The new html5 + webRTC features also come with the ability to customize a chat room look and feel. This means one can design using CSS his own chat room style and do in simply a couple of minutes. This all package, let business owner communicate with their prospective audience in a more attractive way. If you have a smartphone or tablet, you can talk to your friends from simply anywhere.
Business community management is not a single tool that does it for you. It is hard work. But with today’s tools, it becomes easier than ever to manage a community. It means, that combining various tools like Trouble Ticketing system, knowledge base services, Support chat for immediate response to questions and a Chat room to manage virtual events or webinars are the keys for successful management. We even sometimes feel that in large cooperation, a website without a chat is considered incomplete nowadays.
Website chat rooms intensify the gathering and socializing and even make the online community as close as possible to real life.
To make it even more social, chat rooms now days have the ability to invite chatter friends to join the chat room and gossip, your website gets traffic. You can even manage several chats room based on topics or duration.
As always the tools to control an actual conversation are still in place, a chat owner can delete messages, clear the entire chat conversation, ban trolls if you think they are harmful to your chat room. You can also restrict words and phrase that you think is illogical and bad.
Mmm, It seems chat rooms are here to stay as they are a basic fundamental of being social or shall we say, human.