Forum Promotion through Social Media: It’s more than auto posting!

Be social on your social pages to get better results!

  1. Shawn Gossman
    Most of us have a Facebook page or a Twitter account for our forums, right? Well, what do you do with that account or page? A majority of forum owners will create a Facebook page for their forum, get 25 likes so they can have the shorter link and then setup an auto posting feature that will post new topics to their page and then they forget about it. The same goes for Twitter, Google Plus pages and so on and so on.

    There lies the problems…
    A problem exists with the tactics above! The reason Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus isn’t working for you is because you are not working to make it work for you! Does that make sense? If you are just auto posting your content on your page, then there is nothing going on but auto posting. You are basically giving your social fans a closer outlet to see your forum content rather than getting them to actually visit and join your forum.

    So what to do?
    You need to do what social media was made to do – SHARE! I am a cyclist, right? I get on the Bicycle Magazine’s Facebook page quite often because they use specific tactics that make me want to visit it and then I click on their news links in the process and get sent to their main site. The thing they do the most is ask questions that are not related or attached to a link back to their site. They ask questions like “Why made you start cycling again?” and then hundreds of people share their stories. Basically, they have built a community within their page and given people something to do while also seeing new stories they publish on their site through auto posting.

    Viral Content Helps As Well!
    Posting something that gets shared like common cold during flu season will also convert more of your social traffic to forum traffic. You want to create sharable content in the form of something like a MEME or an inspiring video. Then you post it on your page, share it from your page to your wall and let the chain reaction begin, pending on who is in your friends’ list that is. The idea is to create a topic to go along with the sharable content that you have created so that people can see the MEME or video and also find some useful content to go with it, which just so happens to be hosted on your forum. And if you fail, don’t give up; just try again until you get it right!

    Thanks for reading my article on social media and how it can benefit your message forum. I hope you enjoyed it enough to share it with others and comment on it as well. Check out the blog links in my signature to read more articles about forums, blogging and so on from me!
    Dan Hutter and Brandon like this.

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  1. Brandon
    Brandon
    5/5,
    great stuff as always Shawn!