A tool to help manage forum posts?
The context of this idea is this: I am running a Shopify store in my spare time, and I don't have too much money for ads. So one of my major sales channels is to go to various forums with relevant topics, write some posts to talk about the products I sell, also respond to posts that discuss things relevant to the products. I just made a few posts per day, some of them actually attracted lots of discussions, either positive or negative. Very quickly I lost track of what I posted and if need to respond to some responses.
So... I'm thinking of a tool to centrally manage all my posts and responses. Initially just have collections of links. Then I can add notifications for new responses. Then I can even add some quick sentiment analysis on the responses. Effectively managing a community across many different forums.
Do you think this would be useful? Any opinions appreciated!
Hello
What do you think about existing products like Buffer, Tailwind in comparison to your idea?
Will that add some value to existing solutions?
Cheers
Preeti
Thanks for the suggestion. Buffer and Tailwind seems cool for social media like Pins, IG, etc. What I described was more for forums such as reddit, hacker news, and/or millions of old-fashioned forums based on WordPress, etc.
Somehow I'm surprised that some WordPress forums still have so many active users, even in a modern age of social media today.
Ok, I see!
Some forums provide notifications if there is an update on forums related to you for example Indiehacks. Is this not the case with the forums you mentioned above? At least reminders part is taken care of with notifications on forums posts.
Managing community across various forums sounds like a great idea but this will be ever-evolving right if we are talking in terms of users. some users might not be active, while some are very active in the forums
I do feel the biggest challenge is going through all the threads to read and understand the user's inputs. Sentiment analysis will be an awesome thing. Do you have any ideas on how to do that? Since I am working on a project that will have forums too, kind of wondering how can we make forums better in general
Cheers
Preeti
Hi,
This is in fact a brilliant idea if executed well. Yes ads never work, I also have been posting on various forums for last 7 years and it has given better conversion than any other method . Here is what I want from the tool:
Thanks for the points!
Firstly, re your 3rd point, indeed I also had that needs, what I usually do is go to Alexa siteinfo, they have a section "Audience Overlap" which lists sites with similar audiences. Hope it helps you if you don't already know :)
For your 1st/2nd points, totally agree. I'm trying to think of some solutions from technical perspectives. Most forums have anti-bot things today, so it might need some kind of hybrid solution of automate/human.
Yes, i do know alexa siteinfo but it has mostly given me bad results. Anyway let me know when you have a prototype. Would be happy to test it out !
managing multiple conversations isn’t a new problem... and we need better solutions. so, i’d say, go for it!
but “managing a community” is different than managing a thread (or tending to one), right?
and wouldn’t many of these communities have notification systems natively? why not adjust those so that you get notifications or digests?
Yea many forums have native notifications, though they probably don't have an open API for it. So to have a centralized place for notifications, might need to think of something...
For 'community', apologize I might misused the word. What I really meant is vaguely a group of people who are potentially interested in the product :) Yea it's not really a community as strong as FB group, it's more like a loosely connected people who might share some common interests.
for sure. gotcha.
i think this is a neat idea. i mean, dealing with a lot of social data is really hard. it's something that i'm looking into even on the product i'm working on.
please go do this — we need more folks like you building cool shit.