This is my main forum:
Sanctuary: Shattered Sun News
A little bit of background. I used to be involved in loads of forums 'back in the day', but that went by the wayside when life got in the way. Jobs, families, relationships, going
outside. Everything changed for me about ten years ago, which, ironically is about the time that we started to see the importance and influence of forums wane as social media asserted its dominance. Last year I went through a bit of a difficult time and started browsing some old community manager forums and figured I might as well try again. I also started gaming again as I had some time on my hands. The boys were a bit older and didn't require constant supervision. I saw this game, Sanctuary: Shattered Sun and immediately loved the concept. I'm a massive RTS fan, especially large scale RTS games. This new title was right up my street. I started researching and saw it was still years off development. That is the time to strike. I think its incredibly difficult to establish a new forum when there are other forums of the same subject already out there. The early bird catches the worm, right?
So I snapped up a domain without really thinking about it. The game is Sanctuary Shattered Sun and it is a real time strategy game. Shattered Sun RTS seemed like a good way to capture the salient points of the subject whilst retaining the appearance of independence. I found their Discord, joined, contacted them. They loved the idea. They had tried to do their own forum but couldn't make it work as it takes a lot of work to build a successful forum.
They asked me if I would be the "official" community. Of course I agreed. Later they asked me to help with promoting their game so I switched out a lot of the social media accounts I had created to support my forum for the official ones they gave me access to. Now, I am the sole promoter for the game. Social media manager, or something, not that I have a formal title.
But anyway. I have this forum. I need to post more, that much is true, but I also need to leverage the access I have been given to drive more traffic and engagement. The issue is that they have a very popular Discord channel. The current member count is 12751. How do I convert those 12k channel members into forum members? I have considered but have not yet adopted Discord integration. The methods I have seen for integration have not impressed me so far. It's like, I already have an audience, I just need to work out how to get them onto the forums.
The problem I have is that if I post a link to a discussion on the forum onto Discord it strikes up a conversation on the Discord rather than getting people to join the conversation on the forum.
Other things I have in mind are that forums are 100% better at retaining, structuring and displaying information than Discord. You can't really catalogue information on Discord. It's little more than an instant messenger system.
Where do I go from here? The current stats are:
Threads 248 - Messages1,498 - Members 262
:which is not unreasonable for a game which is not going to be released until 2025 at the earliest. I just need to gain some momentum.
I know that the first suggestion is going to be, "post more." But where do I go next?
