Generating Activity

[Cedric]

If you run a community forum, you know how important it is to keep your members engaged and active. Without regular activity, your forum can quickly become stagnant and uninviting. So, what tactics do you use to generate activity in your community?

Offer Incentives: One of the best ways to increase activity is to provide incentives for members to participate. You can offer rewards for the most active members, or for those who invite new users to join the community. Exclusive content, badges, or other benefits, etc.

Promote Discussion: Encourage members to start new threads and engage in discussions. You can do this by featuring popular threads, highlighting interesting topics, or posing questions to the community.

Create User-Generated Content: Encourage your members to create and share their own content. Blog posts to videos to podcasts. Not only does this increase engagement, but it also provides fresh, interesting content for your community.

User-Friendly Experience: Make sure your forum is easy to navigate and user-friendly. A complex interface are a major turn-off for new users. Make it easy for members to find relevant content, connect with other members, and participate in discussions.

 

[Cory]

Content is obviously key to generating activity. The more interesting content you have on your board the more likely your members will partake in discussions around your board. Creating unique content can be a real challenge because so much of the internet is redundant, but if you find a group of members actively participating in your community there is usually more that follows. People come and go on forums, though, there's no guarantee you can keep your members no matter how interesting the content might be.

 

[Kale]

I feel it can be hard to do it if you are the only person putting in the work or effort. I have been trying to do better, but just over the past week or so I've been busy with other things. I do like the ideas you posted in this OP. Posting content will generate activity on your forum for sure.

 

[Strawberry]

Your forum really needs to have a diverse amount of members (and staff) with a variety of interests and and a wide range of knowledge on different topics. Having this will really boost your engagement and unique threads that will appear on your board. For example, some may be more experienced in Web/Forum Management whilst others may be able to come up with some really great General Discussion threads, I feel this balance is important. Having such a range of threads to post in will influence more people to join in as there's likely to be discussions that cater to everyone.