Top 10 Tips for Using Business Forums
The top 10 tips we’ve given below apply to using business forums related to your industry as well as consumer forums where your products or services may get discussed.
- Contribute regularly
When you join any type of business forum online it’s important to make regular contributions so that people get to know and trust you. This can help to raise your profile and be seen as an expert in your particular field.
- Offer advice for free
A common mistake many businesses make in forums is to try the hard sell. If you offer advice for free people are much more likely to come to you when they need someone in your industry to carry out paid work for them.
Include anchor text links in your signature
Forum signatures can have 2 main benefits; you can make it easy for people to contact you and many forums allow anchor text links in the signature field which can help boost your search engine rankings.
So for example, if the main key phrase you wanted to target was “Edinburgh Electrician” then you could add this to your signature and link it back to the homepage of your website.
- Optimise your threads
Many business forums are very active and as such can have considerable SEO benefits. If you’re starting a new thread on a particular subject, it’s worthwhile optimising the title with your chosen keywords. For example you may want to put something like “Edinburgh Estate Agent Recruitment” as a thread title if you wanted to discuss how best to find new staff for your business.
If this thread is then indexed by the search engines, people may find it and click through to your profile on the business forum website.
- Network with other business owners
Business forums can be funny old places with some people determined to make their competitors look bad. Don’t get dragged into any conflicts online, the savvy approach is to build relationships with other people in your industry because you never know when you might be able to help each other out.
- Don’t spam
Almost every business forum suffers from spammers; the people who sign up and then use their first post to try and hard sell to everyone. This approach is likely to get you banned from most forums and even if it doesn’t, nobody will pay any attention to your posts.
- Put your personality across
Whether you’re on a business forum or consumer forum, you should try to get some of your own personality across in your posts rather than being too corporate or formal.
As the old saying goes, “people buy from people” and you’re more likely to get business if you are yourself rather than trying to be someone else.
- Be professional at all times
If you’re monitoring consumer forums and find a negative comment about your company, then you need to remain professional. If the comment is libellous then you can contact the forum administrator to have it removed, but if it’s a genuine complaint you should post a calm and professional reply.
On business forums people often chat about things other than business and use these platforms to vent their own opinions on things such as politics and religion. You never know who might be reading your posts on these forums so it’s important to be professional at all times if you’re representing your business.
- Respond to any complaints quickly
Should you come across some bad feeling towards your company on a consumer forum, then it’s important to address it immediately. Even if you don’t have the answer to a specific complaint right away, you should still post a reply saying that you are looking into it personally.
Make sure you post a positive follow up too saying that the complaint has been resolved and offering an apology if appropriate. This will let others see that your company really cares about customer service and can turn a bad situation into a positive one.
- Use a picture of yourself
Just because you’re representing your business on a forum doesn’t mean you should hide behind the company logo. Using a real picture of yourself on your forum profiles can help with tip #7 and give your company a more approachable image.
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