Message Boards - A community on your site

Message Boards are an interesting Web site feature that could add a fresh element to your site to bring users back time and again. Message boards create a community for users with common interests to interact with one another online, and provide an almost addictive lure to keep people coming back to your site. Read the case study on San Diego Weddings to learn more about how they are using a message board to drive thousands of hits to their site a month.

Message Boards can be advantageous to your site if you have a group of people that like to discuss the topic you are presenting. The example we continue to use is SanDiegoWeddings.com. This is a community of brides that are planning their weddings. A message board has brought them together to share stories, ask questions, research and simply chat. They come together from all over the nation, and though it’s tailored to brides in San Diego, a lot of women are using the site to plan a wedding in San Diego from around the country. This community has become close knit, and has several hundred users that use the site multiple times a day.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of a message board is getting it populated with people who want to use it. Ask people in your industry and people you know to get in your message board and start chatting. Advertise your board. Once it’s running, it’s hard to stop people from coming back.

Once the board is running, expect that it might take a small amount of management. It’s really nothing to be afraid of, but simply know that the attraction of a good message board is the human element to it. The board will always be changing, mostly for the good, but occasionally for the not so good. Remember that not everyone will always share your same view, agree with you, or use the same diplomatic tact in expressing their views… I think you get the point. A decent message board will give the administrator the ability to edit, prune or delete any message or discussion thread as well as ban users. It may grow to the place where you do not have the time to moderate the board all on your own. Ask people who are using the board regularly, or an expert in the field that is being discussed to moderate a specific area of the board for you. This will lighten your load, and bring another personal touch to the board itself.

If you think that your site could use a message board to drive traffic to your site, give us a call, and let’s talk about it.