How do you encourage user engagement and participation in your forum?

[Debashis]

How do you employ strategies and tactics to foster and sustain user engagement and participation within your forum? Can you share specific initiatives or methods you've found effective in cultivating a vibrant and active community? Additionally, how do you address challenges related to maintaining interest and enthusiasm among both new and long-standing forum members, ensuring their continued involvement and contribution to the community's growth and success?

 

[The Raven]

This is probably the hardest thing to do for forum owners. Having forum today is challenging enough because number of people using them is seriously low. Another issue is that there are plenty of new forums sharing the same concept which makes users stretched and makes them lose interest very quickly. To get attention, forum must be unique and must offer something that other forums do not.

 

[Nebulous]

How do you employ strategies and tactics to foster and sustain user engagement and participation within your forum? Can you share specific initiatives or methods you've found effective in cultivating a vibrant and active community? Additionally, how do you address challenges related to maintaining interest and enthusiasm among both new and long-standing forum members, ensuring their continued involvement and contribution to the community's growth and success?

So many smart / big words in that post

Anyway, the best way to encourage engagement and participation with your members is to be involved in the community. Reply to their posts, ask follow up questions on what they had to say, show a genuine interest in your members.

 

[Cory]

My board is a resource board for a particular software, so activity isn't something that is on the top of our priority list, but producing consistent resources and having consistent log-ins knowing users are hopefully using our resources. But, I try and engage in activity by participating in all topics that I can relate to and doing post exchanges and posting packages from time to time. Content is king, after all, it's just sometimes hard to produce unique content that you don't find repeated on nearly every forum you venture.

 

[JoelR]

How do you employ strategies and tactics to foster and sustain user engagement and participation within your forum? Can you share specific initiatives or methods you've found effective in cultivating a vibrant and active community? Additionally, how do you address challenges related to maintaining interest and enthusiasm among both new and long-standing forum members, ensuring their continued involvement and contribution to the community's growth and success?

Tactics for engagement can't be easily answered with one overall answer. This is more like 10 separate questions!

First, what is engagement - do reactions count, or are you only counting written posts and replies? Are you measuring overall engagement, or engagement in specific areas? For example, do you come to Forum Advertiser to learn about new forums, or to socially chat about rape victims? Should we count engagement to the same degree for off topic areas, and do other members actually care about your engagement in off topic areas?

There is also a difference in engagement between new members (who are unfamiliar with the forum), lurkers (who are shy, afraid, or don't feel like they have anything to add), and super posters. They each have different reasons for why they don't post more, which means we need to ask questions for each of these member journeys.

We need to ask ourselves better questions about engagement before we can start knowing how to answer.

 

[~ True Legend ~]

My board is a resource board for a particular software, so activity isn't something that is on the top of our priority list, but producing consistent resources and having consistent log-ins knowing users are hopefully using our resources. But, I try and engage in activity by participating in all topics that I can relate to and doing post exchanges and posting packages from time to time. Content is king, after all, it's just sometimes hard to produce unique content that you don't find repeated on nearly every forum you venture.

Content is indeed @Kyng 👑

And yeah I agree with @JoelR . Also building friendships by remembering info on users helps as that personalises the interaction, whether it’s a user tag or more.