Best Feature to Increase Members Engagement?

[bibitbunga]

I know that this question has been asked a lot for years, but I have read the discussions and not completely satisfied with the answer.

We have increased traffic for our forum http://www.kebunpedia.com (I am not sure if we can put a live link in this so I decided to just do it, but forgive me if I am wrong I will not reveal anymore in future). We have 60-80 guests online in busy hours, and always below 20 users online . Total members reached 3500 yesterday.

But what I am asking is, very low active members on my forum. Daily we only have 80-120 active users (users that are online in a day), and this is ridiculously low if compared to total members 3500. We have been over 1 year old now and it is something that makes me down (the fact of low active members)

I want to ask to all the admins, what are your experience in gaining better user engagement? What are the features you consider of being the key of user engagement in your forum?

Is chat okay? I read all discussions in TAZ that chat is good but comes with negative effect that your forum will neglected, users will stay over chat

All comments are appreciated

 

[Sal Collaziano]

I think CHAT would be GREAT if conversations could be stored in a database and viewed, searched, crawled by search engine spiders, etcetera. It would be absopooply awesome. I do feel "forum" conversations would take somewhat of a hit but at least you could make up for it with people coming in through search engines searches and landing at your stored chat conversations...

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I axed advertisements and that boosted activity and membership dramatically. I also share controversial posts on social media and provide a link telling the end-user on social how to respond and give their views. One particular topic was seen over 13,000 times in 9 hours and got me like 20 members a day for a week straight. It did help though that I already had over 6,000 members to begin with.

 

[andrew3d]

I axed advertisements and that boosted activity and membership dramatically. I also share controversial posts on social media and provide a link telling the end-user on social how to respond and give their views. One particular topic was seen over 13,000 times in 9 hours and got me like 20 members a day for a week straight. It did help though that I already had over 6,000 members to begin with.

May I ask which social media you used to do this?

 

[BeyBrad]

Consider making interesting threads and replies part of your daily activities as an administrator, and encouraging your staff to do the same. This helps a lot.

 

[cpvr]

I know that this question has been asked a lot for years, but I have read the discussions and not completely satisfied with the answer.

We have increased traffic for our forum http://www.kebunpedia.com (I am not sure if we can put a live link in this so I decided to just do it, but forgive me if I am wrong I will not reveal anymore in future). We have 60-80 guests online in busy hours, and always below 20 users online . Total members reached 3500 yesterday.

But what I am asking is, very low active members on my forum. Daily we only have 80-120 active users (users that are online in a day), and this is ridiculously low if compared to total members 3500. We have been over 1 year old now and it is something that makes me down (the fact of low active members)

I want to ask to all the admins, what are your experience in gaining better user engagement? What are the features you consider of being the key of user engagement in your forum?

Is chat okay? I read all discussions in TAZ that chat is good but comes with negative effect that your forum will neglected, users will stay over chat

All comments are appreciated

Honestly, are you asking your users questions when you're talking to them on topics? For example, when a new member joins, you should tell them this:
Welcome to the community, how are you doing today? Once, they respond, don't stop talking to them. The key is to make your members feel comfortable or they won't invite their friends to join. If they like how you communicate with them, then you'll grow. Are you using social media at all? Since your forum is only a year old, you still have a lot of work to do because not all communities can grow a lot in one year.

Your forum already has a good average of daily logins, so just focus on writing new content. When you publish new content, I'd recommend that you incude some questions in your topic because if you're asking questions, then your users will more than likely respond to you.

You could also try launching a new contest. When a forum has a few good discussions going on, then it'll grow a lot of faster, But, if there isn't too many conversations going on, then it'll be very hard to increase your member's engagement. Don't get discourage though because running an online community can be quite tough sometimes, so stay focused. Writing controversial topics might help you increase your daily activity too. For example, a good topic for this might be "Is twitter better than facebook?", etc.

 

[Xon]

Showing user activity in a thread appears to give users nice fuzzies in active threads (ie >60 people online looking at that thread at once). But my idea of an active thread probably doesn't match yours.