Have any of you tried a referral contest to promote your forum? How did it work out?
I haven't- but if you can actually get people to refer genuine new members that plan on sticking around I can see it being beneficial. A lot of times though they just sign up, make x amount of posts needed to be counted, and then later leave because they aren't interested in the niche.
I have tried them in the past. At opening I think it's a worth while thing to do because most members join because of word of mouth anyways, might as well reward the members for doing it.
But doing it after the forum is well-established especially at this time there aren't many other members or the members on the forum already invited all their friends and they are already all there.
When I run referral contests I usually required members to only count once they have made 10-15 posts. At least at that point it isn't a bunch of members with only 1-3 posts.
We've done them here and there, but not very often. We're getting ready to start another one since we'll be participating in an off site event and having our summer event right after that, so it'll be a long referral contest. Not really requiring posts for it, but people get bonus points for doing so so if they wanted to win the contest, it'd be in their best interest to post.
They've helped a bit. Typically the people come on, post a bit, and then disappear. We had one person from our last one seem like they were going to stick around, but then they stopped coming. 🙁
We just sorta do it as a little thing tied in with another event and not as its own thing.
