How To Build A Successful Forum

Sanguine

To all the experienced forum administrators lurking here. Would you share your knowledge about starting a successful forum? For example:

How did you get from 0 posts to thousands?
How did you attract your first active members?
Did you piggy-back on an existing community or start a new one?
What obstacles did you encounter?
What makes your community a successful one?
How did you define the scope of your forum?
Who are your biggest competitors and how do you handle them?
Why did you start a forum? What is your personal reward for investing all your time and energy?
Any other advice?

It would be great if we could produce a getting-started guide for aspiring Flarum forum owners. The tech part is covered, but I feel we miss support for the other stuff. I.e. FreeFlarum sees tons of new forums, but most struggle to grow beyond a few posts.

TIA for all your wisdom!

gurjyot

Sanguine I always like to talk about creating a community and how to grow it. Well, I have been in communities for around 8 years and running a few of my own communities for 4 years. Maybe some of my experience will help, although I am more interested in learning what other's have in their bag ?

It took a long time for attracting first 1000 members and a lot of good content with social media marketing. Most of the content is generated by me and a few other partners (if any in a particular community) by fake profiles.

As the first answer said, good content with a fake profile, SEO, social media marketing are the first main tools. Moreover, I have also organized some competitions like best user of the month/week or competition based on topics. Some rewards also do wonders.

My most of the communities are new but, with Flarum I am trying to shift all of those on this script. Previously I have used a lot of other scripts, so lets see if Flarum can get it right ?

The biggest obstacle which any community has to clear is USER ENGAGEMENT Every day. If people are not engaging every day in a community then it's as good as dead. Once you pass that stage then things start to get easy and you can only focus on communities growth rather than making sure of showing regular engagement in the community.

There are two things which makes a community successful, Good Content and User Engagement. As you might have heard it many times, there is no substitute for good content and it's true. The user engagement is just as mentioned above that nobody wants to be in a ghost town.

The value people get out of my community and a positive environment is what makes my communities successful. These are the two most important things and very hard to achieve, but once achieved they guarantee that your community will stay not matter what.

I am not sure of this one even today

I never look at them. I know it's more of a practical answer but I think that competition is good between brands. When it comes to the community then value and addiction work more than any competition peeking. That's why we choose the best forum software to give the best addiction to our community ?

Do not stop just because it's not getting started (take some time off and make a plan/marketing strategy and then go for it). Do not be in chaos just because it's getting too big to handle (delegate your work by appointing mods and admins with proper/straightforward duties/rules).

This is most of what I have been doing in my communities. For the most part, it has gone well and the communities are growing with every passing day. Although these answers are only for my communities and they may differ from other community owners ?

sfmsubscription

Sanguine As a new user, I love that you are doing this! Thank you!

Sanguine

To get the discussion started, this[1] and this guy[2] argue that you need a basic volume of posts to attract first time visitors, and to do that, you need to create fake identities. What do you think about that?

duman

Sanguine If you'll start from zero it may work but you can always easily understand fake identity posts due to nature of writing skills and zero variance.

Our community is based on FIFA Mobile. We have a league of 32 people. Decided to create a forum for us and around 10 of them registered. In a week we passed 200 posts. Not really so active, but doing do job fine. I've also developed some cool stuff, used OCR to grab text from the mobile app and processed it in C++, generated a vue.js and created a leaderboard via it. So that I can pull content from the game for the leaderboard. It heated up some stuff.

Then I've introduced a money reward for our league. If they can score 40+ goals in total in a League vs League match, and do it 10 times in total, they'll receive an ICON statue and 20€/$ AppStore/PlayStore gift card from me, within some rules.

Then I've launched a Telegram supergroup. It didn't kill forum also helping it, it appears to be. Anyway, about who's your biggest competitor, it's r/futmobile in reddit but they have 10,000 users. We have 10. Decided to invite out of league players and build up our community further this way.

Sanguine

gurjyot If people are not engaging every day in a community then it's as good as dead

Did you do anything special with Flarum to help with this? For example, I can imagine that "auto-follow" would help to make your members visit your site more often (default auto-follow is off for new users).

Sanguine

That is an incredible amount of wisdom already. Thanks so much for sharing! I hope more forum owners will chime in. I would love to, but I have not succeeded (yet ?) in building a good community myself. Later I will write down what didn't work (for me).

Also an extra question for the two of you: Why did you start a forum? What is your personal reward for putting all this energy into it?

Sanguine

So this is what I tried (unsuccessfully so far) at building an online community. My target group is people living on a boat in my country (about 12000 persons). They share very specific stakes and interests (legal, DIY techniques etc). However, the group is also very diverse in age, education, income, online skills.

Starting context
Currently there are some local meetups with max 40 people. One guy has put together a good site on the subject with lots of reference information and a question and answer section. However, he actively discourages online discussion (don't know why) and he does not want to start a forum or cooperate with me.

What I tried
I set up a Flarum on a catchy domain. I parsed 1200 existing questions on the subject, and identified key topics. Then asked some friends to write initial questions/content about these topics. And wrote a few starting posts myself using different accounts. All in all, I started out with 12 posts. Also, I patched Flarum to not display "last activity date" so I could run experiments with the same content for a few days. I installed Mouseflow to be able to analyse first time visitor (FTV) behaviour.

Then, I set up Google Adwords for all of the key phrases. This generated about 100 visits in a week.

What happened
The bounce rate (leave within 30 secs) was about 60%. For the remaining 40%, people engaged with the forum and read most of the discussions. However, only a few started the signup form. And none posted content themselves.

Theories
What went wrong? A few possibilities:

Internal:

Not enough content to convince first time visitors that the forum was active enough.
Styling not professional enough
Wrong choice of topics
Wrong tone / contents of starting posts
Topics too factual, not "provocative" enough

External:

Visitors thinking that the chance of posting a question and getting an answer was too low.
Visitors reluctant to complete sign up forms in general.
Visitors not digital-savvy enough to participate in forums in the first place.
Visitors cannot identify with existing content

Follow up plan
Now, I would be willing to invest more time in producing more/better content. However, I would like to validate first whether a forum for this niche group is viable in the first place. Not sure how to do that.

Facebook/Reddit/Twitter dominate the "online discussion" space by lowering the UX entry barrier. Now, I could forget about running an independent forum and start a FB group instead. But I don't like the FB monopoly at all.

I could piggy-back on other offline initiatives like meetups and a physical magazine. But getting from physical to online seems like a big step.

MikeJones

Sanguine How much did you pay for those Google Adwords? And how did you pick search terms?

gurjyot

In my communities, I try to be as much active as much possible. I never give a chance to members to think that the community is not active. If I have mods or other admins in a community then I also make sure that they keep running for their money so that community won't go stagnant.

Off course it's difficult at first, but with regular good content (using fake profiles or some friends) engagement starts to rise. Once people start to come, I give them, even more, audience by sharing their post to social media in a much viral sense (now here you have to be clever). People join a community for three main reasons

They have plenty of useless time
They want some help and they are already impressed by our old content
They are pioneers in the content you are serving so they join to give their two cents

Now you gotta be clever to judge which member is which and according to your community which strategy can help you achieve results. Not every community goes with the same rules and strategy so you have to adjust according to that. But, whatever strategy you go with, never compromise on Good Quality content.

Sanguine

MikeJones $50 or so.. I analyzed similar forums for keyword density and picked those

Cjcrux

'Promotion' Is The Key

Pollux

Sanguine $50 or so.. I analyzed similar forums for keyword density and picked those

Would you consider your advertisement a success? How many new registered users did you pick up with $50?

Sanguine

Pollux It certainly failed, as I had zero signups. Perhaps my base content was not convincing enough, or the intended audience didn't fit an online forum. Anyway, I quit my endeavors and started Free Flarum instead.

Pollux

Sanguine It certainly failed, as I had zero signups.

That was always my expectation.

Perhaps my base content was not convincing enough, or the intended audience didn't fit an online forum.

I ask myself what would make me register in a forum. And the answer is simple: It's the kind of discussions I could have. If a forum has vivid discussions about interesting topics with funny and thoughtful users I will be tempted to register and participate. If a forum is empty with only a handful unwitty users that write once in a fortnight... no thank you.

So you need good discussions to attract people who could participate in good discussions. But how do you get the whole thing started? That's tough.

One possible path is if you know already a couple of interesting people and they are interested to join a new platform. In this case these people know what to expect even if nothing is visible yet.

Another path is if you yourself can write such an outstanding content, that people are willing to register just to talk with you. Over time discussions between your members will develop too, but in the beginning everything depends of you and you alone.

MikeJones

Pollux that is essentially what I am attempting... Write really good content and hope one or two people join in.

I joined adwords to help speed that up. We shall see!

Pollux

MikeJones

I really like your approach and your dedication, your seek adventure forum is awesome.

Instead of or parallel to adwords I would actively look for people who might be interested to share their trips in your forum. Are you active in other forums yourself? Do you know people from there who could contribute? Funny adventurous people, awesome photographers, people with an enthralling writing style? Try to lure them to your forum. And if the first other users have arrived, care for them, engage with them, show your dedication without looking like a control freak.

MikeJones

Pollux I do participate in one other outdoor forum but I don't want to advertise in there. I don't want them to think I am poaching...

I also participate in reddit a lot and have recieved a lot of traffic from there but no registered users.

Pollux

MikeJones I do participate in one other outdoor forum but I don't want to advertise in there.

Great, and that's not what you should consider. Nobody likes advertisement, not for commercial purposes and not for competing websites. I thought more about people with whome you have developed a personal bond, people you have already contacted by email or other means beside the forum, people you have probably already met in real life.

If you can find three or four other likeminded souls who see your forum as their own project too, that's worth more than twenty people who have registered due to your advertisement. Registration in your forum is not the endpoint. People engaging with meaningful content, people seeing your forum as one of their homes in the internet, people enjoying to engage with you, that's the endpoint. I have one member in my forum I learnt to know in another forum 15 years ago and we still enjoy our conversations.

I like your forum because it has a real purpose (and an interesting one), a foundation for meaningful content, a basis to have fun together. Now you need to find some people who want to share their experience with you. Not a lot of them, but the right ones. Why not ask someone from your family, some of your real life friends, people you have met on one of your trips?

Henryson

MikeJones Maybe Your Sign Up Button is Hidden Or Hard To Find, The easier for users to register the better.

MikeJones

Pollux Thanks for all the great suggestions I will definitely take them to heart and I am glad you like the content I have on Seek Adventure so far!

luceos

MikeJones I'm also consistently intrigued by your forum. Would it be an idea for you to create a dedicated discussion here to work like a blog thread (or use medium) talking about your installation, choices (extensions etc) and hosting? I'm very curious to hear more about experiences people have with Flarum.