Own a community? How do you promote to the right audience?

 

Well, one of the most common grievances for community owners is about poor engagement after promoting their forums on social media. This is usually a result of trying to reach the wrong audience. For instance, promoting a gaming forum in a Facebook group dedicated to selling merchandise will not yield meaningful results. However, promoting your community in a group where most users are gamers could lead to conversion. Therefore, it is essential to tailor your promotional efforts to the right audience to maximize your community's growth.

Promote your community by identifying your target audience’s interests and platforms. Use social media ads, collaborate with influencers, share valuable content, and engage actively in related groups. Consistent communication and clear benefits attract the right members genuinely interested in your community’s purpose.

Totally agree. I've been running forums for a long time, and while it's true over a decade ago, you could just slap a forum up on the Internet and people would find you via Search Engine, today's world is very different. It's up to forum administrators to market their community as if it were a product. Why?

Because of Social Media giants. They've made ginormous platforms by dumping financial resources into advertising and researching human behavior. People would join, and those people's friends would join. Why should somebody join your tiny niche forum? Everybody else is on the mega platforms.

We need to go a step beyond what the Social Media platforms did. We need to take that same research data, and figure out ways to make our forums attractive. Unfortunately, most of us don't have big pots of money to dig into for marketing campaigns and advertising strategies. But there's a glimmer of hope, that I'm hoping will pay off-- at least with my tiny niche forum.

• Figure out who your audience is.

• What do these people crave?

• How can you deliver what these people want?

• Now, you can figure out where to advertise for your forum.

So for my forum, it's an anime role playing paradise. Right? Creative writing, probably a mixture of older people (people who are familiar with old school forums), and younger people (people who have a lot of creative energy, who are into anime. But that's not quite focused enough. What kind of games am I aiming to host? Well, Magical Girl genre primarily. That falls under the Shoujo category. Heroines, girls stuff. Romantic tropes, but also some superhero power and magic stuff. Girl empowerment, maybe even some coming of age stories. And considering the anime that I'm wanting to role play in is a bit older (1990s to early 2000s), I'll probably want to focus my attention on women in their late 20s to early 40s.

My forum isn't designed to be a discussion place. We're not reviewing trending anime. So advertising in anime based Subreddits or Facebook groups probably won't work very well. Besides, experience has taught me that people who belong to these mega platforms tend to stay on those mega platforms. Ah, but what about role playing groups? Again, close but not close enough. People who participate within the role playing groups (again on mega platforms) enjoy discussing mechanics, rules, game setup, dealing with player strategies and problems with staying focused. Because I'm not looking to primarily discuss topics on my forum, this wouldn't be a wise place to advertise in either.

That leaves me looking at places where people who enjoy sharing Creative Writing tend to gather. But also, there are specific Subreddits for role-play partnerships. Most of these groups focus on 1x1 role playing. So advertising in these groups is not only frowned upon by the respective moderation teams, but would just be a poor choice anyway. I'm looking to build a small group of active participants. Tumblr is another place where I may find a few people interested in my forum concept, but, again, this is a mega platform. Why would these people abandon something they're familiar with, or outright prefer for my forum?

So now that I've sort of figured out where to target my advertising, what is that these people crave? (Yeah, I know, I'm kinda doing this backwards.) People who enjoy creative writing, specifically collaborative creative writing want a distraction-free place to write. They want a platform that's easy on the eyes. They don't want to fight with tiny fonts, or even beautiful fonts. Many of them enjoy the use of Sub-Accounts, so they can feel more immersed in the stories. An avatar / face claim is an easy to recognize symbol of the character in scene. Ample resources for lore. If I'm building a world for people to play around in, I'm going to want them to stay on the site for as long as possible. Some people are like me, we have ADHD. (I am part cat-girl!)

After I figured out what my potential members want, I started looking for specific forum enhancements that would give my forum an edge over other places. Unfortunately, with XenForo, many of the enhancements are paid for additions, so implementing them is dependent on my available free finances. However, I feel confident that I'm building a safe place for creativity with a fun backdrop where the imagination can run rampant.

Obviously, I haven't covered everything that I'm using in my current strategy, because I know I've forgotten about half of it just while typing this, but I think this should serve as a decent guide- at least in my thought processes.

You should definitely do some research and look around for places where you can promote your community before you create it. There's plenty of people out there who are willing to try alternative platforms and just maybe that new community they decide to check out is yours! I got a few members on Gex Forums from Reddit, and some came from Sonic Retro which was another Sonic forum. I keep seeing Reddit Alternatives popping up because people aren't a fan of Reddit's moderation.

I guess that if you have a forum specifically for a specific community, then you might promote that forum to other members of the community. This doesn't mean that members of other community couldn't join the forum. Other members of other community should also be encouraged to join the forum. However, you could discuss problems specifically related to your own community.

Promoting to the right audience takes one thing to make it successful:

Knowing who your audience is.

This is something that you should know before you start your forum. Just having a niche isn't enough. You need to have a persona of the perfect member in mind. You need to know exactly who you're creating for.

This becomes difficult when you have a generic niche.

A generic niche is something like gaming.

What makes "gaming" generic is the fact that it's too broad and general of a topic. There is a lot of competition for it. The keyword "gaming" is no competitive that you'll never get even close to ranking for that keyword. So, it's safe to say it's going to be a hard niche to do on a forum, as well.

But wait a minute, gamers, don't cuss me yet.

You can succeed by narrowing down your niche. Focus on specific game genres or certain games or a certain console. The further you narrow down your niche, the easier it will be to identify your audience.

But you also need to take your passion and expertise into consideration.

Choose a narrowed down niche that you're passionate about and have some kind of expertise with or a will to become an expert at it.

But at the end of the day, if you don't know exactly who your audience is, how do you know who to promote to?

On 7/4/2025 at 10:15 AM, Shawn Gossman said:

Promoting to the right audience takes one thing to make it successful:

Knowing who your audience is.

This is something that you should know before you start your forum. Just having a niche isn't enough. You need to have a persona of the perfect member in mind. You need to know exactly who you're creating for.

This becomes difficult when you have a generic niche.

A generic niche is something like gaming.

What makes "gaming" generic is the fact that it's too broad and general of a topic. There is a lot of competition for it. The keyword "gaming" is no competitive that you'll never get even close to ranking for that keyword. So, it's safe to say it's going to be a hard niche to do on a forum, as well.

But wait a minute, gamers, don't cuss me yet.

You can succeed by narrowing down your niche. Focus on specific game genres or certain games or a certain console. The further you narrow down your niche, the easier it will be to identify your audience.

But you also need to take your passion and expertise into consideration.

Choose a narrowed down niche that you're passionate about and have some kind of expertise with or a will to become an expert at it.

But at the end of the day, if you don't know exactly who your audience is, how do you know who to promote to?

A narrowed down niche is the best way to do it. For example, if you're making a gaming forum, focus on "Nintendo Gamers" or "Playstation Gamers" or "Xbox Gamers", as this method will be a lot easier to going after the entire crowd. It is a lot easier to build a community that's designed for a specific crowd than a broad area these days.

You'll be able to build up to the wider audience as your community grows and more members join, however, the smaller the niche, the better off you'll be. You don't want to overwhelm yourself trying to target a wider audience, when it's a lot easier to rank for the long tail keywords. There's less competition within that broad spectrum. It's also easier to find specific players for these type of games and systems.

I've primarily been dependent on signature advertising on forums of a similar niche. I have 8,000+ posts on the official Jcink support board with an advertisement banner attached to my signature for people to find my board. I run a forum for Jcink resources. I'm sure people see the advertisement banner in my signature from time to time and check it out, since we're there to provide administrators with Jcink-related resources and services, and where better to drop your advertisement than the official board created for the service.

I run a fashion brand and my target audience is always ladies and women. I have an online community for my brand. And to promote that brand, I join social media platforms that have women as the only audience or the major audience. And I always try to hit the nail on the head on what they stand to gain from joining our community. I showcase to them the events and the programs that we do related to fashion in our community.