Growing a forum community in 2023

Some of you has succeed, some are trying to be positive, but most of owners will just getting declines from time to time. Anyway this is reality.

Fact :
 

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Some of you has succeed, some are trying to be positive, but most of owners will just getting declines from time to time. Anyway this is reality.

Fact :
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This chart is virtually meaningless without more context / information. What is the source? What does "interest" mean? And how was it measured?

Note that the decline started in 2009. That's when Facebook hit its stride and grew exponentially. I'd like to see the trend of that chart after 2020. I wouldn't expect a big change, but maybe a subtle tick upwards.


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Note that both charts end at 2020. Google "Facebook user decline," and you'll find plenty of recent articles about that.

Personally, I quit FB cold turkey almost 2 years ago after over a decade of VERY active use. In so doing, I abandoned my primary means of communicating with friends and family. It had to be done.

I believe the pendulum is swinging back to forums for special interest groups. FB fell on its own sword and continues to do so.

The special interest forums where I have been a member for the same time period have not shown any signs of waning. They are growing. And now I have my own niche forum that is growing very nicely. In a week, my forum will be 10 months old.

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It is much harder to grow a community nowadays with social media to compete with. The only forums that thrive today are the ones that have already been established at this point. Not much can rectify that since most people use social media over a dedicated site on a topic. There are very few instances in that an average person would use a dedicated community over social media, and I think that's where the problem lies for community growth.

However, our company has succeeded in specific niches, and we have grown our communities significantly through user promotion and a little advertising.

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I don't believe it's a zero-sum game between forums and social media. Yes, it certainly isn't like the old days where you can build it and they will come. Very different today.

However, I believe that in most niches, social media and forums can co-exist and complement each other. For example, my niche is freshwater planted aquariums. Most of the activity has moved to Facebook Groups over the years. I started two months ago focusing on the needs of that community that social media can't fulfill. We've been growing. Slowly but that's OK.

On my site, a member can create a diary of their aquarium and have people see it, offer help, support, etc. People can find longer articles on subjects and participate in photo contests, etc. None of these things work well on Facebook where you really can't post more than 2 -3 lines into the constant waterfall of messages. If you get one or two valuable responses, you feel good.

I encourage my members to use both as intended. Longer talks, relationship building, diaries, contests, etc should be on forums. When they just want to go to a less thinking more eye candy environment, then Facebook and Instagram are there for them.
 
Not much can rectify that since most people use social media over a dedicated site on a topic.

That WAS true... for a while. It is my belief that the pendulum is swinging, and swinging HARD, back the other way.

Why? Because "big tech" social media has gone off the deep end with censorship and "cancel" culture.

Private forums don't have that issue. Also forums like these are FAR more organized, better-archived, and more searchable for information than the likes of Facebook.
 
However, I believe that in most niches, social media and forums can co-exist and complement each other. For example, my niche is freshwater planted aquariums. Most of the activity has moved to Facebook Groups over the years.

That was true for my niche, as well... until big tech started deleting and canceling groups in my niche. So, I guess that's lucky for me! LOL!
 
We have a Facebook group and a forum. We administer the Facebook group pretty carefully, with post approval turned on, and we favor posts by our in-house staff and content experts. We also make it a point to mention our forum and provide links to interesting threads from time to time.

Our approach might best be summarized as using the FB group as an introduction, and the forum the place for more serious, in-depth discussions and a much greater sense of community. This means, e.g., there are things we consider appropriate for the forum but not for the FB group and vice versa. We also have a FB page and an IG account - you have to find your own rhythm, I think, for how to make the best of use of all these things. There's no point in lamenting their existence so try to use them in ways that can help you and also have the forum for your more hardcore fans.

FB group administration tools are so poor. I've been interviewed by FB at length on more than one occasion - they really aren't interested.

-S-
I once tried this approach with a well established Facebook group I have. I had opened a forum a few years after creating the group to try and eventually move off of Facebook completely, but unfortunately I only got 20 members to join out of the thousands I had in the group. I didn't want to pay for hosting anymore, so I canceled my plan and closed the forum down. I completely agree, the group administration tools aren't that great. Now I feel we have another "threat" to forums, Discord. I've seen a few communities move from forums to Discord, and I'm just not as active in these communities as I once was because I prefer forums. Certain communities thrive much better on forums, and I think many people fail to realize that. They end up jumping to what "everyone else uses" and leave forums behind.
 
Wow ! this thread was certainly a good read with a lot of input and advice.
I too have had many forums in my days before Facebook became a house hold name & even before this lot came onto the scene, it was still hard to get members to join the forums.

Me and my brother are 65 years old and we love to moan what is going on around the world these days- so we thought, there must be other people out there our age wanting to do the same and not use Facebook, as it's all " Look at me and look where I am on holiday ". and those selfies are driving us nuts !!!! using all these filters to make them younger

So we decided to start a forum and call it "The Ventroom" not just for moaning, but with other interesting subjects

We have no idea how this is going to take of, but we said we will give it a go and see what happens after one year.
I have around 500 friends on my Facebook - so I put an add on there about the forum ( didn't say it was my forum ) and I never got one single like !
But when I put a photo of my dog on my Facebook - received around 56 likes.

People are so addictive to Facebook right now, maybe a wee bit brainwashed- I must admit they eventually lured me to open my account, but my daughter kind of helped with that - but I could close my Facebook down tomorrow and not lose any sleep.

I have been there, done it and bought the T shirt - but this time it's different, I am doing it with my brother.
We both live in different countries and we both have been through difficult times recently - so starting this forum is a wee adventure for us.

So we will see what happens and thanks Xenforo for building that stage for us.
 
Forums need to learn from social media. Not in order to become social media but to learn how to compete better with social media. There are some things social media does better than forums and some things it does a lot worse. Learn from the things social media does better and use that knowledge to make forums better. Having a UI from the late 1990s doesn't help bring young people on board.

Forums have been on life support for around a decade now. It's going to take some real innovation to turn that decline around.
 
I will persist in my disagreement that "forums are on life support." Some are, perhaps. But, I'm observing a significant decline in the "big tech" social media sites. People are growing very tired of the selective / biased censorship based in wokeism. Very very tired of it.

I see this as a huge opportunity for private forums. Though many forums are being bought up by large corporations, who engage in the same wokeism as the big tech sites like Facebook. But us private / individual owners can do (or not) as we see fit.

I've mentioned this before.... My forum does not engage in wokeism, censorship, or overbearing moderation. I don't care if something posted is politically "incorrect." I don't "bleep" out adult language. Who are we really fooling with that ****? <--- See what I did there? You were undoubtedly able to fill in that bleeped out word without skipping a beat. Your brain automagically does it. So, again... who are we fooling? We're adults!

I engage in very little moderation. Almost none. Rather, I treat members as the adults they are and let them work out their differences if any. I'm trying to remember if I've ever deleted or edited a member's message. I don't think I have.

Maybe I'm just "lucky." Or maybe I'm doing something right. My site is not huge. But here are my stats. My forum began 1 year, 5 months, 24 days ago. So about 100 new members per month. About 1900 messages per month. Not bad, I think.

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