Keeping forums relevant in social media age?

[templaters]

I have been using vbulletin to build a few forums over the years.

I have had great exceptional success in a couple of them , over 5 million hits per month with 70 plus paid advertisers. I did not pay for traffic just dedicated members.


Rules for success = The forum must be unique. That means loyal users.

Games , chat rooms etc don't help a forum.

You must have constant updated content and the best content is provided by users.

You must have a real easy to remember domain name.

Finally try to have a forum about something that you and others can have a long interesting conversation about and not be boring.

Selfies, social media events are all boring. You are competing with millions of others.

Now if you had a forum on how to make buggy whips that would be unique.

Otis

Originally Posted by templaters

over 5 million hits per month

This seems highly unlikely, unless your the BBC news or similar

[romaine]

Originally Posted by kevcj

It seems traffic to forums that deal with blogging and forum development has dropped a LOT. Why is that? Are fewer people building websites? Or, are those people hanging out in places I do not know about?

You are right, my forum dropped a lot traffic recent months and I could not do more to improve it, seem Google and other search engines are changing and everyone likes building websites than forums.

Only certain social media platforms allow the interaction that a forum with a thread format does. FB is OK but the rest seem inappropriate eg Twitter, Instgram

On social media threads soon disappear down the timeline and can't be accessed in a heirarchical way

[Alan_SP]

Talking about that, social media is more like some kind of "eternal" right now, without much past and future. With forums, there's all three: right now, past and future.

[threadloom]

Keep your users engaged. Use newsletters, and focus on great content. The days of simply having a chatroom are gone - and users crazy more than that.

Forums are one of the oldest and traditionally most reliable forms of communication on the internet. It's our job to ensure they continue - so engage your users often, and frequently as you can.

[Mattwhf]

I didn't post on social media recent months, especially Facebook but no problem, the forum is still good and visitors and new members still come from search engines. I think we should focus on this source than spend too much time on social media.

[Prince]

It amazes me how forums have died in the past 5 years due to social media (which I despise), I still run two vB forums, but they're nothing like they used to be.

[lange]

Originally Posted by webmastersun

Are you sure you have visited all webmaster forums? have you visited my webmaster forum https://www.webmastersun.com/ ?

Very nice design!

How many active members?

https://www.webmastersun.com/forums/...-and-ecommerce ...