Like for many things, many small details can make a huge difference. The following suggestions are pretty easy to put together and achieve great results in less than a month.
So, what are the easiest actions you can take to bring your forum up to the next level? Let's see!
Regular Newsletters
Your active members don't need to be reminded to visit your board. The other 95% of your members do! Make sure you send out a newsletter once a month at the very least. Every time you come up with a new feature, a new contest, a new anything: Newsletter! If you don't have anything to say in a newsletter, what then? Easy. Send out an email advertising your 5 or 10 most exciting discussions of the moment. Oh and don't forget: Sound excited and dynamic, that always works.
Community Events
Community events are going to please those regular members who might want to take it to the next level. When your community is active enough, you'll have the chance to organize events such as a live chat event, or a live radio broadcasting event. Members will love to interact with each others in a much more direct way in the chat, for instance. If you can invite a guest speaker, it gets even better! You can post the chat log, or audio log afterwards so that everyone can check it out. It's a great way to bring the community feeling to the next level.
Posting Contests
That one is pretty straight forward. People love gifts. You can come up with all kind of contests, depending what kind of niche your forum is part of. Gift cards are usually a great and easy prize.
Make Better Use of Social Medias
Make sure your content is posted on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can use TwitterFeed or IFTTT to automatically share new threads to Twitter and Facebook using RSS. Something that will greatly increase your forum's visibility will be to share some of your content on social groups on Facebook and Google+. A lot of people usually take part in these discussion groups. You'll give them a chance to discover your awesome content. Oh, and don't forget to use hashtags! You can even encourage your members to share the content they enjoy on the social networks they are on.
Publish RSS Feeds
RSS feeds allow your forum to have discussions posted automatically when certain sites you connect with, publish new content. Usually, a snippet of the recently published article, or the whole thing gets posted inside that new discussion, and a link to its source is provided. Automatic posting like this is a good way to start new discussions, but keep in mind that the concerned content isn't original to your site, so don't over do it. Make sure that no more than 20% of your new threads are from RSS feed sources. Otherwise, your forum will look like a feed reader and that's the last thing you want. If you notice that people don't or rarely reply to some of these threads, adjust the sources accordingly. Like for most things, balance will be important.
Conclusion
Most of these tips are pretty basic, that's what makes them so easy to put to use and make things happen. We all have our own ways of keeping our community active and well, and success will depend on a ton of things. In the end, keeping your members active and happy is a big deal and the 5 suggestions above are good ways to get things moving in the right direction.
Feel free to comment and share your very own secrets to keep the activity up!
Feel free to comment and share your very own secrets to keep the activity up!
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