Forum Moderators: rogerd
We have quite an active community, 7,500 members and around 25,000 pageviews a day. The site revolves around "What's On" listings for clubs, gigs, etc and we rank very will in google for all our venues
We;ve started offering lots of personalisation features for members - when you see an event you can mark that you're going along, then see a calendar of all your upcoming events - plus the ability to add photo galleries from nights out etc.
Sounds good, but people aren't biting - theyre looking but not adding things to calendars,etc - we think the problem is a lot of browsers aren't becoming members so the personalisation bits arent immediately available...
We tried making membership mandatory to look at certain listings but that annoyed people so had to be removed. More recently we've added a 'this is me' feature to all our photos, but again, one person in a group clicks, then the rest of their mates probably look over their shoulder and dont bother signing up
Another competing website has a system where you can say "My mate's in that photo" and when you do it emails them about it and automatically creates them a user account - this seems a bit risky (no opt in) to me
does anyone have any suggestions for making people want to identify themselves, join in, use all the features (we know the features work as a competing website is using them and have a very active community.... just now sure how they got there, apart from the spam!)
Any suggestions? Cheers guys - first post!
B
Has anyone got any suggestions?
Cheers
Ben
does anyone have any suggestions for making people want to identify themselves, join in,
Have you had a look through the forum library as there are many posts revolving around the issue of getting lurkers out into the open?
use all the features
That one is mostly up to the features being required by the members. You need to give them something that they really want. If you do that, they'll use them. If they're not using them, you need to consider that they simply may not need them.
......a competing website is using them and have a very active community....
If the feature set is substantially similar, you will have a tough time competing with a more established site.
just now sure how they got there
Well if they were the first site (or at least the first succesful site) offering these features, then in the first place they would have had a unique element in their favour when they started. That, more often than not, is a contributing factor in a sites success.
You're possibly lacking that unique quality. That would be the direction I would start thinking in.
TJ
Since there is a forum that is already meeting many of the needs of this market, you need to do something a bit different. That could be features, or just the "personality" of the forum.
One thought - since it sounds like you are addressing a social, party-going audience, perhaps a few "life of the party" type members could get you going. I'm thinking of attractive, friendly, male and female members (depending on your target market) who post a lot, interact with new members, etc. Lurkers may be induced to say hello themselves, and, once posting, will continue to post.
Once you hit critical mass, things will move forward on their own. Until then, see if you can identify a few of these "facilitating" members and convince them to post, or even reward them in some manner. Individuals with existing networks of friends would be particularly good.
While you could fabricate one or two of these and play the role yourself, your topic and audience make the pseudo-member approach problematic. Good luck!
Very helpful. The 'competing site' was actually setup after ourselves but theyve been having a big push on their marketing hence our visitors decreasing a little. We do however have a different geographical coverage area, so no reason why we cant play them at their own game up here!
I like the suggestions of the lead members to get things shaken up a bit - and we've decided to run a few competitions for people using the personalised features - all of which will encourage more people onto the site
I'll let you know how it goes!
