Some of my tips to grow a community

[unsutsbiz]

I work at a web design and development company that manages its clients' product forums. This is a short summary of what I have learned are the most neglected activities that can help a forum like this to grow its community. I am not trying to tell anybody how to run their forum just sharing my work knowledge.

1-Enable the the community leaders.
You should select the best users in your forum and make them moderators. This helps your forum by making it easier for you to keep it free of spam and also gives the community a sense of belonging. An enabled user will talk about, share and +1 your forum more and this will help the community grow.

2-Allow topic diversity.
Removing off-topic posts angers the users and such off-topic pages could be indexed in google and create for you some traffic from keywords that you would not get . Keep off-topic posts or move them to an off-topic section, but do not remove them. I have seen that keeping such posts can increase your google visitors by up to 25%.

3-Encourage the Loyal users
You do not need to give expensive gifts , all you need is to say kind words of appreciation to the specific individuals by name in your posts or replies to them. Words such “Thanks for the excellent post as usual.” or such make a big difference.

4-Trolls are sometimes not trolls
Sometimes a user has just had a bad day . Sometimes certain terms will bring out the worst reaction in a person. Do not judge by the first time, give a guy a break and do not delete their membership from the first sign of trolling.