Don’t Let your Forum Die, Keep your Members Alive!
April 23rd, 2008 Posted in 3. Forum Management
Don’t Let your Forum Die, Keep your Members Alive!
Keeping your members active, dedicated and interested is quite a challenging task in the long run. Administrators and the staff team will need to hold regular events to keep members interacting with each other and the forum.
Here are some ideas which you can take up to maintain activity within your forum.
- Contests - Contests help bring back members and activity, depending on how successful it is managed etc. (Read my “Forum Contests, Forum Success?” Guide).
- Forum Add-ons. Such as Money, Bank and shop Mods. Motivates members to post more for more forum credits. Remember! never to inflate your forum money value. Keep it controlled and managed.
- Quality Content - A necessity for a forum to be successful is regular updates on new quality content.
- In depth-Discussions - I have noticed, forums with a forum (or sub-forum) for debates increases the forum activity dramatically. How? because once a member joins a debate, he/she will be wanting to keep returning and enforce their point of views. So give this a try. But remember, keep this forum moderated, don’t allow excessive abuse or flaming.
- Incentives - Incentives work extremely well for members to maintain their activity. One popular award for members who are active is the ‘Member Promotion’, promoting the member into a special or more elite group where they have additional profile features (more inbox space, custom team icon, different colouring etc). If you don’t have this in place, give it a try.
I hope these 5 points will help you keep your members alive and active.
© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:32 am
Hey. Great content; looking for more. I’ve bookmarked your site. Weird name, though.
May I ask why you require registrations to comment? It was kinda intimidating to register (but I enjoyed reading your entire blog enough to register). Akismet is a good, free anti-spam solution which eliminated all of my blog spam when I tried it.
I’ve just started working on my forum, Teen Business Forum, and will definitely use some of your tips to improve my site. Thanks!
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:22 am
Thank You Edward, i just forgot to turn off registration before commenting.
I’ll sign up at your forum as well.
And you can subscribe rather than bookmarking.
I usually write a new entry everyday.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:27 am
I’m thinking of doing a contest, probably along the lines of “Person who posts topic xxx wins a $20 gift card at Amazon” or something, to promote topic creation.
I’m also going to advertise at related teen sites, and possibly post up fliers at local teen gathering places.
What do you think about installing a stock market addon? I’m thinking that it would really appeal to the Teen entrepreneur-type, and encourage repeat visits (to check stocks, and buy and sell.
When advertising, what landing page would you suggest? The forum index will probably convert badly, but I can’t think of any content pages which would convert well either.
Thanks!