Importance of Listener Forums

[kbachelder]

That is the heart of the matter, but I'd really like to see a lot of focus on the forums part... I'd warrant that most of us want lots of users but don't spend a lot of time looking at the underlying statistics of how many people stay on the boards, the time between posts, ratios between listeners and posters, etc... It's all good stuff to talk about, I'd just like to hear some experienced voices share their findings and approaches.

I'm curious to understand why you feel it's important to know the statistics on your forum usage?

Not that I think it's a bad idea...I just don't understand how that would be helpful/useful.

Allows looking to learn. :)


Thanks,

Kevin

[DoctorAtlantis]

OK - I'm not saying for certain that forum-stats matter - but I think they might be worth looking at. Here are some somewhat random musings on the stats:

The statistics of a forum such as how often people sign up to the forum, how often they post, and how many posts they make may be indicative of the forums overall health index. Forums require active participation from the users in order to grow and it certainly isn't within the power of most forum admins to also generate enough content to keep a forum vibrant. You've got to have a vital user community and there's no formula for measuring that health as far as I know.

But there might be some kind of Forum Health Index that you could derive from some stats. How often people sign up shows your growth. But if people sign up and then never come back - that's no mark of health, so perhaps how long they stay active matters.

If your forum requires you to sign up in order to read the boards you probably fail to get a lot of readers who are just TIRED of signing up for boards. On the other hand if you let anonymous posters post you'll never be able to keep the spam off your boards and that will turn your boards over to spammers in a very very very short time and the "real" users will abandon you.

You can't know exactly how many people listen to your podcast, but you can find out your downloads count. You may (or may not) find a correlation between listener growth and forum membership. It might be a useful statistic to graph the two numbers and correlate that with your own marketing efforts. For example if you run an ad or have a popular guest and then see a corresponding spike in listenership/board-activity then you could tweak your content to play into that demographic or marketing practice.

What may be harder to track, but is probably also worth looking into, is the number of users who post a while and then drop out. What I've noticed is that the activity level of forum members is all over the place and only a few core members producing a lot more content. Some folks love to get those "post-count badges" and become a forum legend. Others just like to lurk and lurk.

I've not looked deeply into my boards to see what stats are available, so some of these may not even be viable depending on the board DB, but I'm curious if anyone else has looked into it. If your boards are ad-driven this is even more important since you want to be able to know how many eyes are reasonably expected to get on a particular banner with a particular rotation schedule.

[kbachelder]

Thanks for sharing all that detail.

I do think that forum usage is one way to get a glimpse into your listener base. However, as you said many people today have too many forums to check so they don't even bother to register. They may be viewing your forums but they never sign-up.

I think it's important to make it easy for your listeners to get involved so offering forums, an email address, a voicemail number, twitter updates, robust blog comment systems are all ways to make it easier for your listeners to interact.

I've talked to several listeners of the podcasts that I contribute to at Dragon*Con and many say they are loyal listeners that never miss a podcast but they're just too busy to bother with any of the community options. Go figure.... :)


Kevin