Context: I've been proposed to enter in a venture creating forum software. Doubts: With all the alternatives today such as facebook and twitter, do you believe there is still room for new online forums? Have not all topics been covered already? Questions: 1) What makes someone want to start a forum? 2) What makes someone want to join/participate a forum? Marketing question: 1) How would an expert in marketing convince someone to start a forum? Once again: I love forums, the question is more of a mental exercise to see how one would convince someone to create a forum of their own (my reasons below). Which one would you appeal to? Merci beaucoup, C PS: my 2cents to the marketing question: *promote/show off their own knowledge *Ego: being the king of a little community *truly contributing, helping the world be a better place *make friends
Social media ganged up on the forums, beat them up, kicked them into a corner and left them there to die.
Other than that, all is well with forums. To me, the ultimate argument for starting a forum is that you have an identified, significant audience that is waiting for it to start.
It's one thing to give an argument for creating a forum and it's a relatively quick and painless exercise to do it - making it work is more involved - however you're looking at creating forum software? Given the number of scripts that already exist I'd be seriously asking you if this is the best use of your time and talents?
I'm confused about whether you want to develop forum software or if you want to start a forum website.
How would you determine the right audience to start a forum? I agree, but no, the goal is to market existing software
There's no community meeting their needs currently You have significant expertise and respect within that community
@sarahk has offered some important information. I would also add that the trick is to find an underserved market that is large enough so that a small percentage of the audience will be enough to serve as critical mass for a forum. What I mean is that if I were thinking about a forum for engineers that use bond graphs in their designs, I suspect that this group would not have a forum. Of course, there may be less than 100 people worldwide who even know what a bond graph is, so if you got 10% of the population, you would have ten members in your forum. One other consideration is whether or not a targeted audience will be willing to participate on a forum. Should your target audience be 15-year-old first -person shooter gamers (like my son), I doubt that you could get him anywhere near a forum. It is people like me (older than dirt) who started with Usenet in the 1990's and now lament the decline of forums, in general, who would be the most likely participants.
Participation is even trickier. If we look at the 1% rule, it says that "only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk." On every 100 subscriber, I would have 1 poster. Puts things in perspective.