Generating Activity for your board

[Cedric]

What tactics do you generally use to generate activity in your community?

My most successful way is just by posting with the members, getting to know them, and providing them with something to chat about. It seems that at first it takes awhile to get them into the swing of posting topics on their own, but with help from the administrators and staff, they'll learn to not be so shy.

 

[Nomad]

I go to webmaster forums and look for post exchange services. By using this service, I post on someone's forum and he will be posting on mine. This is an easy way to build content. I also use a content posting service.

 

[Daniel-cash]

You generate activity in your forum by filled the forum with quality contents so, that anyone that come to your forum will always wanted to come back. Also, you can encourage members to be more active in your forum through financial reward. However, a new forum can't have enough finances to financially reward active member.

 

[oldbuddy]

I don't have a forum yet, but I try to stimulate traffic to make the ones I frequent more interesting and useful. On each visit I check my messages to follow up on and check the What's New page to see where I can add my input in some way. There are often new topics that I have an opinion about and I don't hesitate to share new ideas that may be supporting wherever I can help.

 

[ClicketyKat]

I ask my members questions and not the yes, no questions, but questions where they'd have to write a few words. I sometimes forget to do that though, in the rush to get through all the sites I go to each morning.

 

[Cory]

I try to keep the content flowing in, but being a forum service board most people come for the services and resources. Not much attention is given to the general discussion forums. I should do some contests from time to time to help generate some activity, but it has never been my forte. I'm mainly focused on the services and resources, so when people are in need I try to help them quickly and efficiently and I try to keep a steady pace of resources coming in.

 

[Shortie]

When it comes to generating activity on forums I soon learned that it takes a lot of work to bring people in and for them to want to post. I found that spending some time creating my own threads that would bring in discussion helped at first and me and my staff members would spend time doing that and replying to each others threads to get conversations going. I would also go to forums where post exchanges were offered and look for post exchanges for either replies or threads to help bring in conversation and activity. This worked really well along with advertising.

 

[Reverie]

At the beginning of a community the biggest thing is about being able to create enough content for users to respond to. Respond to their posts and create a discussion! Don't just let people make one response, quote them and relate to them and ask them a question based on their responses. Sometimes I would have people join at the beginning and help create a few topics so that way it's not all created by me such as in the general discussion area. Niche specific content, I or a staff member would post this content at the beginning, but the goal would be for users to begin creating the content themselves too.