I run a message board for an Internet Radio Station & Urban lifestyle website. I can't get people to post. I chat daily with people about the site. They register but they do not post. I even started a $50 dollar contest and still no one posts.

I have about 90 members and my website get about 4000-5000 hits a month. Am I just impatient? How do you reach the critical mass where people start posting without giving away a fortune?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josephjrr,

Sometimes it can take a long time to build up a large membership that posts large volumes of messages per day. In the case of my message boards, one is over four years old and only now has close to 1100 members, of which only about 30% post with any frequency. Even after the first two years, we were a fairly slow board with only 200-some members, and it was only after we moved to Infopop (away from EZboard) that we really started to take off. In the other case (where the board is actually run by my father for his business), the board has been fairly inactive since it was converted from an ancient (1996 vintage) proprietary script. The problem there has been very similar -- very infrequent posts, despite a regular influx of new members.

All I can really suggest is that you recruit a small number of people who you know will post faithfully and with some kind of regularity. Consider it a seed around which other potential members can congregate to help grow your board. Use those people to help set an example; once you start getting some regular traffic, the whole thing will gradually start to snowball.

Ok I like the last suggestion. i have been examining some of the larger corporate entertainment infopop boards and I see a core group of people who post sooo much that I wonder if they are actually being paid to post.

I approached some of those same people about posting on my board and i don't even get a response.

Hehheh, I know what you mean. There's a gentleman on my board who's made more than 10,000 posts in the past two years, when I haven't even made more than a third that many -- and it's my board!

Finding the right people to get the board going is definitely going to be the hardest part. In retrospect, I think that's part of the reason why it took my board (the Subspace Comms Network) so long to take off.

An additional suggestion on top of what I said before: perhaps what you could do is try to recruit the people to help foster the discussion and make them into moderators for your community. Sometimes the extra status, privileges, and responsibility can be a draw to induce some people to post more frequently.

Hi, Joseph:

I've just been to visit your board. Looks like you are doing a good job of giving good opportunities to post: starting discussions (that's what I was going to suggest). Dan's right, though: give someone a special title and the responsibility for fostering discussions, and you give them a sense of ownership that will go a long ways towards growing your community.

Hey Joseph-

I like that you don't have too many forums. A lot of folks start off with 100 forums and wonder why no one posts... it can be overwhelming!

If you can, try to recruit your family and friends to post... On my board, all it took was some family (they didn't identify themselves that way) on the board to jumpstart things and they took off! Didn't hurt that they posted about some controversial political things either People can't resist a good controversy!

This has been a helpful discussion. Thanks for the question! I've been trying to launch a new forum, which I think has the potential to grow some great legs.

I've been trying to check in with readers from other Forums I've participated in to see if they'll also pay a visit and hopefully inspire some conversation (since they're already comfortable with forum participation). This has seemed to help traffic a bit, but hasn't resulted in too many postings.

Related to this, I've been wondering if there is a way to show the number of times a thread has been read from the main page (rather than only within each category) so that those who pay a quick visit can see that there is activity happening, even if there are a limited number of posts.

In other words, it strikes me as another subtle way to show that there is activity happening (even if it's passive), and thus encourage participation.

Nothing worse than feeling like it's just you and the crickets on a discussion board!

quote:

Originally posted by KHamm:
Nothing worse than feeling like it's just you and the crickets on a discussion board!

I put my URL in every message everywhere I go! It works well and is picked up by google when it spiders those sites.

Just another idea.