Forum Moderators: phranque
On day 1, visitors come along, see the empty discussion board and move on. How do you encourage the first tentative visitors to engage with the board?
So far, these are the ideas I have:
1. You can create a number of fake characters/members, maybe 20 or so. Then use them to create discussions, so that when a genuine visitor comes along he/she gets the impression that there is a discussion going on to join on to.
OR
2. After setting up the board, arrange for 10 of your friends to go along over the course of a day or two and start making a discussion on it. Again, when a genuine visitor comes along, he/she may want to take part.
I have tried to create a discussion board a couple of times, but they did not amount to much because the sites did not reach a "critical mass" of members / active participants.
So I was wondering if anyone had (successful) experience of creating a community, could they share it please? Many successful communities (such as WebmasterWorld) arise in response to an existing discussion group. But here we are trying to create a group out of random website traffic and initiate a discussion.
Many thanks for any advice :-)
We have a very active membership and useage on the forums on our site. It was all started with simply 1 "Welcome to the new forums and please feel free to play around...." type message. No fake people or threads.
We now have several hundred members and several hundred threads going on (been going 2 months).
TJ
How will your forum be split down? There's no point having everyone posting in one forum and not the others.
If it looks like that is going to happen, then split the forum into sub forums, like Brett has done with the Google News forum.
Subject area. Are you sure it's an area people want to discuss? Will they be going to the forum for help or for a debate? Or both?
Moderators. Very important, even on a forum with little traffic. It gives the impression of professionalism and it also guarentees regular, and more importantly, knowledgable posters.
Polls and surveys. Create open threads on topics that you know people will contribute to - doesnt matter if it's an old issue - as long as people contribute.
Posting exchanges. Not very effective IMHO. Tried a few in my time. It's OK if the other person is related to your subject area and is likely to make regular posts, but in my experience, the quality of post exchanges is pretty poor.
Hot topic. I just saw a new forum launched 2 days ago (not one of mine), by someone with little knowledge of web marketing or forum building.
It has taken off very well - almost all members have posted. The reason behind it is that it was a very under-discussed topic and a lot of people are passionate about - and it was promoted in one location - the source of existing discussions on the subject! ;)
On site promotion. A few pages and adverts encouraging your exisiting users to contribute to the forum will help. Perhaps start threads on site feedback, etc will get the intial posts going.
Plus, you can also include what you mentioned in your post - friends, alternative user IDs, etc.
Scott
