Best Practices for Mobile Forums

As our upcoming webinar - Web Forums Out, Mobile Forums In (Oct. 2, 2 pm!) approaches, we wanted to dive into what makes an organization's mobile forums a success.

Forums through Clowder are user-generated and serve to continually engage your community. When a user creates a post, it opens up communication within the app. Readers are able to comment on, like and subscribe to content in the feed. Forums are the perfect way to get people talking and collaborating on a consistent basis, right on their mobile device.

Uses of Forums:

- Industry topics

- Project collaboration

- Event engagement

- Recommendations

- Job postings

Frequency:

You should aim to have at least 2 new forums in the app each week.

Influencers:

Identify and rely on different influencers within your organization such as department leads, content writers or other staff members to post in the forums each week. Because users can comment on and like content in the news feed, influencers can use that to gauge what may be intriguing discussions to start. This will eventually spark other users beginning to post on their own in order to converse and gain valuable opinions, feedback and knowledge from their network.

Mobile Exclusivity:

The forums feature is a great tool for creating that mobile engagement hook. By only being able to access this important resource through your app, members would have to download and turn to it for the desired collaboration and connectivity.

Promotion: 

It’s important to prioritize the promotion of your forum in order to keep this feature top of mind among users. Continue to remind them of this valuable resource they have access to for easy network interaction. Promote through social media, newsletters, email and any other outlets circulated throughout your users.