Don’t Let your Forum Die, Keep your Members Alive!
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
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