Hi All,
I have never built a forum or community-driven website, but I was wondering how it starts.
Let's say you have the idea for a good forum, but no one is joined yet. Do you just make fake accounts and write fake posts?
If so, is there a good way to automate this early behavior rather than manual fake posts?
Thank you,
SeoSiteTool
Well there are some services in which you can get posts automatically. But I don't recommend them because forum is all about building a community. People should and always think that the suggestions or the information that they are getting are from a real person. Not from a machine.
Creating fake profile and posting from them is a common practice for new forums. Actually people don't like empty forums. Content attract visitors to become members and create content in return. If you are not willing to do all the heavy lifting by yourself then ask your family members or co-workers or friends to do it for you.
A while back we started a community which involved few of your friends from office. Some of us did all the content creation and some just focus on outreaching the audience through various SEO techniques, SMO, Emails etc. And then it take only 6 months to get our community to hit critical mass.
You certainly can use post exchange services. But the it will stop when you will stop posting their forums. So, why waste time in which you will get low quality posts in your forum.
Creating fake profile may be old school and look like that you are cheating your audience but it works like a charm in new forums.
Fake accounts are part of a strategy. When we started our community we have some fake accounts too. The purpose of them is to look the forum busy.