[TheLastSuperman]

Originally Posted by kevcj

What can forum owners do to compete with the large social media and social networking sites?

Since some others are replying to old threads, figured I'd do the same and jump off the bridge with them, weeeeeeee! I still <3 you guys and gals!

What can help forum owners compete with Social media... games? Unique site features (what is unique these days?)

The ONLY three things that can maintain a forum in my personal opinion are:
- Unique content.
- Consistent participation.
- The "need" for this forum i.e. if you're going to make a Radio Controlled Car site, there are already many of those... if you do not post unique content and don't participate on your forum daily to make others do the same, your R/C forum won't be anything extraordinary and will just fall short.

So you can create a forum but if you're not going to upkeep it and participate or at least have a steady moderator who does the same then you won't be keeping up with social media anytime soon. To keep your forum relevant you could do integrations related to the social media platform you're targeting i.e. if you find your site spoken about on facebook regulary then by all means make a page for your forum on facebook with information about it, add modifications and plugins that help your members easily see content on facebook and such.

The sky is the limit, so is your imagination as to what you can do with your forum, if you're not being creative (or at least clever in a sense) then you're never going to keep up with social media or be relevant in said social media when the forum is "lacking" due to having copy and pasted content and/or not a lot of active daily members.