How do you figure out why your competitors are winning?

good board, not competitive

[ardent]

I run a small but decent board, 7k posts/year in an education niche. I have 3 main competitors (many smaller ones): the big ones are 10-100x more active.

I'm trying to learn from the bigger forums. I'd like to hear comments on what y'all think is important and what is not.

Here are some initial observations:

1. Brand awareness. People actually search for the competitor's website name (keyword search tool).

2. None of them use phpBB. Surprise to me. Is this important?

3. The forum is primary, content pages secondary.

4. The design/layout is tight. We're using a slightly modified but mostly standard subSilver layout. Lot's of white space.

5. All require login to post (so do we).

6. Most posters on the 2 big forums have avatars - few on our forum do. We have never added avatars to the gallery, perhaps we should.

7. A lot of chit-chat on the big forums, less chit-chat on ours. Perhaps we're too formal?

8. Each board has a substantial non-profit/charity component. This is something we've also begun.

If there's interest, I'll follow up with changes/effects.

[Endurer]

2. None of them use phpBB. Surprise to me. Is this important?

I'm not sure if this is just a speculation or a reality, I do feel the same.

Depending on the demographics of your forum, avatars may or may not interest or in other words, captivate members. Try installing a few other phpBB modifications, i.e. the activity mod / the album mod.

One of the most important thing is for the interesting topics to crop up ocassionaly. That will keep the members intact to the board. You can make one or two ghost id's for thar purpose.

Last but not the least: bring something out which none of your competitors offer at the moment.

[rogerd]

I depends on your audience, but some of the little extras you describe won't make as much difference as the basic quality of the community and its members. If people show up and find it to be a friendly, welcoming experience they'll stick around.

I don't think most people care what the software is, and 95% won't even know. A good page layout and fast loads are a lot more important than the "powered by" fine print.

[Endurer]

10% of my the members at my community have their own get-a-free-remotely-hosted-phpbb-board. It's becoming more of a hobby for people to open a message board than profession.

Number of members plays an important role. A forum with 100 members registered would do nothing over-night than a forum with 10000 already registered. It took me 8 months to have registered a 1000 members and one month for another 1000. As soon as the figure crosses the three digit mark, people start jumping into it.

A plain message board is not what people are looking for. They want everything in one single website. Be it blogs, news or anything that attracts them. This is where I have to work on, sometimes I re-package a certain feature and cunningly introduce it as a brand new feature so that I may attract new members as well as keep the old members intact.

Rogerd: I agree with you. But how can one possibly introduce quality into a forum with 10-20 members posting a little about nothing?