How do you manage your community? Whats your strategy?

[Hotfix]

Branching out old forums to new audiences is basically growing a new forum almost and even simply "existing" is a challenge nowadays, by the way the "old farts" have a bit of experience gained through many errors and difficulties, no one is trying to show off but to help and discuss maybe with people with new opinions strategies etc.

Thank you for your insights. I have tons of respect for you guys, even though it might not seem like it. I'm much more inexperienced in both growing a community and managing a community – that's why I asked if you had any updates. I find the knowledge shared in this thread valuable to me.

Grazie for your time once more.

 

[Max Fridman]

Bumping this thread for sharing more thoughts about community management, i didn't found much resources about it or outdated ones most of the time.

2020 was a hell of a year...

We had a lot of traffic during the first lockdown, but during the summer our traffic plummeted, as expected because people stopped using the web entirely. Now we don't see spikes or very low traffic because the lockdown is "the new normal" and people are back to work and study and live their life normally. At least for us.

I experimented various things:

• Articles and Newsletters
  • I dropped the curated Newsletter format, and i just send automatic emails to our members. I found more activity and search results around single long-form articles. I like to change things and try various formats so maybe i should have continued with the newsletters or maybe not.
• Content and SEO
  • I worked a lot during 2020 to study and understand more about SEO practices, and we are slowly implementing every best practice i could think of. We now have an internal "Content Writing Guide" for our staff, we use SEO addon's and we are developing ways to improve the SEO "value" of content produced by our users without them even noticing it.
  • Im trying to cleanup and remove every issue i can see to improve the SERP for our content and indexing.
  • We now work with Keywords, Data from Google Search Console and a manually curated list of threads to update, create and mantain.
  • We implemented a Table of Contents addon and we are working on more custom addons to improve SEO and Topic Formatting.
• Experiments
  • We are working to use Twitch more and Telegram Audio Chats for "Podcasting" purposes. Ill try to incorporate our podcast into our content to have rich results on Google.
  • We found success on our Instagram strategy and keep working on it, same for Telegram.
• Custom Development
  • Xenforo is a great platform but needs a lot of customization to work well, a lot of things i could think of should be implemented into the "core experience" and they do not. Communities need many tools to thrive and Xenforo should keep up at least with our mayor "competitors". Xenforo have a lot of features "sketched" but not fully implemented to be nice to use (take Tags for example a lot of addons can improve your experience and SEO value drammatically, but those addon's should be built into the core experience).

Building a forum is a marathon not a sprint, but i feel like this 2020 was productive in many ways, i learned a lot and in 2021 (which is already at 25%) i feel like we could see a lot of improvements before the end of the year.

How is your forum management journey going?

 

[Faust]

Bumping this thread for sharing more thoughts about community management, i didn't found much resources about it or outdated ones most of the time.

2020 was a hell of a year...

We had a lot of traffic during the first lockdown, but during the summer our traffic plummeted, as expected because people stopped using the web entirely. Now we don't see spikes or very low traffic because the lockdown is "the new normal" and people are back to work and study and live their life normally. At least for us.

I experimented various things:

• Articles and Newsletters
  • I dropped the curated Newsletter format, and i just send automatic emails to our members. I found more activity and search results around single long-form articles. I like to change things and try various formats so maybe i should have continued with the newsletters or maybe not.
• Content and SEO
  • I worked a lot during 2020 to study and understand more about SEO practices, and we are slowly implementing every best practice i could think of. We now have an internal "Content Writing Guide" for our staff, we use SEO addon's and we are developing ways to improve the SEO "value" of content produced by our users without them even noticing it.
  • Im trying to cleanup and remove every issue i can see to improve the SERP for our content and indexing.
  • We now work with Keywords, Data from Google Search Console and a manually curated list of threads to update, create and mantain.
  • We implemented a Table of Contents addon and we are working on more custom addons to improve SEO and Topic Formatting.
• Experiments
  • We are working to use Twitch more and Telegram Audio Chats for "Podcasting" purposes. Ill try to incorporate our podcast into our content to have rich results on Google.
  • We found success on our Instagram strategy and keep working on it, same for Telegram.
• Custom Development
  • Xenforo is a great platform but needs a lot of customization to work well, a lot of things i could think of should be implemented into the "core experience" and they do not. Communities need many tools to thrive and Xenforo should keep up at least with our mayor "competitors". Xenforo have a lot of features "sketched" but not fully implemented to be nice to use (take Tags for example a lot of addons can improve your experience and SEO value drammatically, but those addon's should be built into the core experience).

Building a forum is a marathon not a sprint, but i feel like this 2020 was productive in many ways, i learned a lot and in 2021 (which is already at 25%) i feel like we could see a lot of improvements before the end of the year.

How is your forum management journey going?

My forum is very small and it's about photography.

I did implement a lot of features as well. And i would say some of them turned to be useful while others didn't really gain interest from members.

We do have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as well. Twitter and Facebook works automatically, while on Instagram i do post manually.

Hard to grow a forum, especially when around are a lot of social media sites, others forums, and agaim new social websites.

 

[Max Fridman]

Hard to grow a forum, especially when around are a lot of social media sites, others forums, and agaim new social websites.

You should put community instead of "forum" and you will be much more inclined to evaluate things differently. You are curating a community of people, so everything you do is "for them" and to give "value" to them so they can't find it anywhere else.

You don't need big numbers, you need a loyal community. Keep up if you apply a good strategy things will slowly build up.

 

[Faust]

You should put community instead of "forum" and you will be much more inclined to evaluate things differently. You are curating a community of people, so everything you do is "for them" and to give "value" to them so they can't find it anywhere else.

You don't need big numbers, you need a loyal community. Keep up if you apply a good strategy things will slowly build up.

Agree, depends on the niche. My forum is for very small niche, so much I’m not expecting. Been working a lot on my community and a lot of features has been integrated.

But still hard to make it unique nowadays.