Hello WHT,

I am not sure if this is in the correct forum, but this has more so to do with the business side of hosting. A good amount of you are web hosts and as such, I am hoping you can shed some light on this situation.

We have a community forums, however none of our customers really take advantage of it, it just sits there and well, collects dust most of the time. I have made various posts to keep customers informed in case they do not receive the emails promptly.

Did customers just eventually start utilizing the forums after a while or did you use any particular tactics to get them involved? I am just curious, I hope my customers will be able to post more and more eventually, :D.

Thanks for all the feedback,
John

Well, actually yould be surprised.

Posters in any given forum are generally at most 10% of the total registrants, and even those combined are way less than people who come read the forums without even registering and go.

I have been running a few community forums, one is a high profile general public appeal one (humor), and even in such an easy go environment this is the case.

In more serious places, which require even the littlest of knowledge/expertise or flair or charisma, you will see less of these rates.

And for web hosting its a little bit more complicated - most clients have not ever thought about being a part of community or not - they just want to host their site just like they get stuff from the grocery - reliable, no-fuss, fire and forget style. Hence your community forums will be that way for a very long time until you get enough clients to be able to get a 5-10 percent poster rate.

If you really want your users to post & be active, you have to give them a good reason. Otherwise why would they? They can just read the forums & pess the little X in the right hand top corner of the screen.

Give them a reason, they will post. Since March I've managed to accumulate 750+ users using this tactic.

what tactic are you talking about?

what tactic are you talking about?

The tactic of giving them a reason to want to participate. Anyone can put up a message board on their website, but people aren't going to just start posting on it. It has to be interesting and they need to get something out of it.

--Tina

Aussie Bob could give your more details here... He was the owner of httpme.com, the most important hosting (actually reseller) customer community.