Do you profile your forum members?

[Beverly]

Do you know what your forum member's profile is?

For instance, let's say you have a gamer forum for Xbox and you post a poll for your members asking for details. And, in your poll you find out the typical member is 16 -20 ears old; goes to school; has a summer job and plays 6 hours of Xbox every week. Just knowing these things would be helpful for targeting your audience to find new members for your site. This is just an example of information you might find out. You might also use profiling to find out your current members preferences for receiving email; what type of posts they enjoy currently as well as content they want to see that you don't have. All of this would be valuable for marketing purposes and to improve your site's current content.

Have you tried this idea, to profile your members to find out more about them so that you can identify if you are hitting your target audience?

 

[Atrox]

No, I don't think that I would ever have any need to profile members. I do not see there being any point in such, as long as I am gaining new members I couldn't care less. Although it is not wrong, because if they are willing to take part in such polls then they're obviously fine with it all. 😛

 

[Thomasss]

It seems complicated however in the end I think it could potentially work. I mean it might be going too far for small forums and certain niche forums like promotion forums however I think for general discussion forums, profiling your members could totally help with marketing and advertising, it's something most people don't think of to be honest and it's something major companies do so forums should also start doing the same.