Strategies How do you keep your forum relevant in the era of social media?

[Debashis]

In the era of social media dominance, how do you keep your forum or website relevant and competitive?
What unique features or approaches have you adopted to differentiate your platform?

 

[Empire]

I tend to not worry too much about that anymore, as it's going to eat you up so badly that you end up making it worse on your Fourm and on yourself. Be free with the community and post/topics on just whatever you want based on the subject of the site.

Not always going to please everyone....

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

Privacy. Social media tries darn hard to get you to use your real name. Also, when you "like" or reply in groups, often times your friends and family see your activity in their news feed and it can be embarassing. With forums, you can discuss topical niche content without exposing your identity and interests to snooping eyes.

 

[Cedric]

Privacy. Social media tries darn hard to get you to use your real name. Also, when you "like" or reply in groups, often times your friends and family see your activity in their news feed and it can be embarassing. With forums, you can discuss topical niche content without exposing your identity and interests to snooping eyes.

I agree. I can never fully be myself without embarrassing myself to people, friends, family, clients, etc.

 

[NeoMetallix]

Privacy. Social media tries darn hard to get you to use your real name. Also, when you "like" or reply in groups, often times your friends and family see your activity in their news feed and it can be embarassing. With forums, you can discuss topical niche content without exposing your identity and interests to snooping eyes.

Not just that, they have very powerful trackers all over. The more they know about you, the more they can manipulate you.

 

[Darth Cognus]

Not just that, they have very powerful trackers all over. The more they know about you, the more they can manipulate you.

Including commonly bundled on forums, with googletagmanager appearing on this very page. Rare is the forum that is not also a tracking vessel. You're probably done if you've logged in anywhere google or meta property along any site you ostensibly consider private. Embeds alone typically suck in facebook among others. So unless a forum makes special considerations privacy is... relative. There is discussion to be had if the privacy implications of a forum are that much better than more centralized places, with random internet users with a title on a forum able to casually look up your ip and potentially much more. At least for centralized platforms this is generally buffered by scale and the fact local communities rarely have a fraction of this access, of course if you trust that platform at scale is a whole nother question.

Facebook (ew) is one thing but places like reddit, discord, even google can at least give you the casual internet appearance of privacy despite being massive platforms that have all done damage to traditional forums.

Not to dive into this too far since I'm straying from the subject a little.

 

[NeoMetallix]

I value privacy on my forum. Got rid of google analytics and social media sharing buttons. With forums you have the option but not on big tech sites. I think there is a huge and growing population that value this and that's what is appealing about forums.

Also if you really need analytics there are several open source ones that work just as well.

 

[Cory]

I don't have to worry about social media much since I own a resource board dedicated to one forum software. However, a lot of people use social media to display their resources and offer them to the public for the forum software I support. I just try to keep the resources flowing in at a consistent rate and try and think of unique code ideas for scripts I can make available to the public. I think my board is somewhat more unique than what most people have to offer due to its vastness and variety of resources available.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I don't even try to compete against social media anymore, when I first started getting into forums and owning my own community, I kept trying to get people to leave Facebook and join my forums but it never went anywhere and I barely ever got any members. (I didn't know about promotional forums at the time unfortunately...) It's best to focus on running a great community for your members and potential members, plus like others have mentioned there's groups and pages on Facebook that I wouldn't want to interact with since I wouldn't want to get embarrassed since I have a huge family and I'm friends with a lot of them on Facebook not to mention I'm friends with a few coworkers too.

 

[Teegold]

The truth is that one has little power over the dominance of social media especially in today's world. So instead of being worried over that, one should look for peculiar means to keep his forum alive. It could be offering some rewards or incentives to members that participate regularly and some other things.

 

[Nomad]

social media is for social discussion, social networking and social broadcasting, however, communities are just for social discussion.

 

[cpvr]

In the era of social media dominance, how do you keep your forum or website relevant and competitive?
What unique features or approaches have you adopted to differentiate your platform?

I focus on providing content that users in my niche won’t be able to find on social media. Which in turn, helps me attract users from social media platforms. There’s also various discussions going on social media regarding certain topics in my niche as well and I join these topics & promote my community where I can. I’ve managed to drive in more members just from joining other discussions.

Social media has more users, but you can also utilize it to your advantage if there’s a lot of people on there that’s discussing certain topics regarding your niche.

I’ve also seen some of my members promoting my forum
on reddit, tumblr and twitter as well, which has helped my forum remain relevant With high competition from social media.