Reorganizing Your Forum

This is a common sight in many online communities:

Some thoughts:

1. Organize your categories by popularity. Most popular to least popular.
2. You should remove categories with no activity(note: when you do launch a new category – be sure to accompany it with a big promotional push). Media we love, classified ads and everything else can go.
3. When you see a popular discussion taking place in your community, or a frequently mentioned topic come up, create a category for it and mention that to all members.

Frequently update your forum to make what members want more accessible. Be reactive (and receptive) to what's happening in your online community.

Comments

[Jennifer]

Excellent points!

Also, if you're creating a category based on existing conversations on a certain subject, it's well worth the effort to "seed" the category by moving those older threads into it.

Everyone wants to be heard, and the more active you can make a category appear, the more likely folks are to give it a try.

[Pat]

Do many sites use forums anymore? At my last gig, we dropped the forum because most of the conversations had moved to our scial media space.

[Tasmijn]

hi Richard,

Shouldn't you be more careful when removing content?

The number of discussions doesn't neccesarily mean it's impopular. Perhaps it's only interesting to post for a few people, but yet is read a lot. Or maybe, just that topic is what keeps your most important users locked - exactly because the subject isn't available in a lot of communities.

And then you have people just being completely irrational. In 'Influence', Robert Cialdini mentioned a case where only 3% of a company's customers participated in a specific program. The company reckoned that they might as well kill the program and lower their prices all together. That would satisfy at least 97% of it's customers, right? People went mad - only because the company took something away that they chose not to use.