Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Solved

Any meaningful differences between Articles and Topics?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
September 28, 2021
8 replies
192 views

Aside from needing to be on the Admin team to create ‘Articles’ - what are the main differences between Topic and Articles?

Visually on the community it seems like almost no difference, so I’m curious what else is there that I’m not aware of?

We have a use case where we where creating ‘Best Practices Articles” by our leadership - but I’m wondering if there is any reason that they can’t just be Topics (Conversations).

Thanks,

Best answer by olimarrio

Hi @Dorothyt :wave: ,

Here’s a little summary of all the content types:

Conversation: traditional forum thread with replies listed in chronological order
Q&A: place for users to ask questions and receive answers from the community or your team. Can mark “best answer” and highlight this on the content itself.
Ideas: User generated ideas & feature request. Can label the status of these requests, and allow for upvotes
Articles: specifically for company-related content, long-form posts and allows advanced content configuration flow (save as draft, schedule post, publish).
Events: Promote your scheduled events within your community. Can differentiate the type of event, using Zapier integration can even register attendees to Zoom/GotoWebinar to capture attendees
Product Updates: Used by the product team to share release notes, roadmap updates.
- Can be assigned to a product area, so when you publish it can be around a particular product or feature.
- End users can subscribe to a product area, so they’ll receive an email when you post a new product update

For your use case, you could still use Conversations if that better fits your purpose. You’re right, visually they do appear similar and the only differences are the content configuration flow listed above and that they are published by one of your team.

Hope this answers your question!

olimarrioAnswer

Gainsight Employee ⭐️

Hi @Dorothyt :wave: ,

Here’s a little summary of all the content types:

Conversation: traditional forum thread with replies listed in chronological order
Q&A: place for users to ask questions and receive answers from the community or your team. Can mark “best answer” and highlight this on the content itself.
Ideas: User generated ideas & feature request. Can label the status of these requests, and allow for upvotes
Articles: specifically for company-related content, long-form posts and allows advanced content configuration flow (save as draft, schedule post, publish).
Events: Promote your scheduled events within your community. Can differentiate the type of event, using Zapier integration can even register attendees to Zoom/GotoWebinar to capture attendees
Product Updates: Used by the product team to share release notes, roadmap updates.
- Can be assigned to a product area, so when you publish it can be around a particular product or feature.
- End users can subscribe to a product area, so they’ll receive an email when you post a new product update

For your use case, you could still use Conversations if that better fits your purpose. You’re right, visually they do appear similar and the only differences are the content configuration flow listed above and that they are published by one of your team.

Hope this answers your question!

Gabolino

Helper ⭐️

From a functionality point of view you have a few more options with Articles, like adding a header image, call-outs, multiple body images, etc.

It must be said though that “visually” they can often be indistinguishable to the naked eye.

olimarrio

Gainsight Employee ⭐️

Excellent point @Gabolino, thanks for pointing those differences in functionality out as well.

cclements

Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Revisiting this, are there differences between an article and a conversation in terms of analytics? Weighting maybe - not sure? Just trying to make sure I’m not shooting myself in the foot down the line by converting conversations to articles or vice versa. @olimarrio @Vishwas Katti

~ Courtney Clements

Paul_

Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Revisiting this, are there differences between an article and a conversation in terms of analytics? Weighting maybe - not sure? Just trying to make sure I’m not shooting myself in the foot down the line by converting conversations to articles or vice versa. @olimarrio @Vishwas Katti

Not that I'm aware of, but all content we write for our community are articles, and the UGC isn't. That way we can (for example) use content helpfulness on the articles and not the other content. It's an easy way differentiate. In addition to the replies further up.

olimarrio

Gainsight Employee ⭐️

Hi @cclements 👋,

Not really in terms of analytics. However, the search algorithm does give a higher ranking for articles as a content type so you’re more likely to see these as suggested results or at the top of the search results page as this content type is often used for company approved and more ‘official’ documentation.

revote

VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

How about SEO perspective, article vs. topic (discussion)?

olimarrio

Gainsight Employee ⭐️

@revote 👋, we have more Google structured data within articles, questions (e.g. marked best answer) and events which will improve their SEO rating.

Didn't find what you were looking for?

Sign up

Welcome to the Gainsight Community