I have read in many places that it is good to always have social media pages associated to your forum. Can anyone confirm that they actually see positive results from doing this. I have recently gone all out doing this one Twitter and Facebook and to date have seen no link to it helping at all with my forum.
I have even had a number of my followers on Twitter commenting on how much they enjoy my Tweets. I have had plenty of my Tweets being shared and so on. With my new site I now have 776 follows but not one hit on my forum from this all.
So as of now my feeling would be to rather focus this effort directly on my forum itself. :shrug:
Where are your followers from? Having a lot of followers means nothing if a lot of them are bots or inactive users. If you want to succeed on social media, you need to find active users who are interested in your niche, which can be hard because it isn't usually obvious who is interested in what.
If you post a useful article on your forum. You can tweet with the help of hot topics or pictures. Make it vivid and attractive. Then link "Learn more" to your forum thread.
I believe it helps in getting a wider audience not necessarily the members on the Forum. However, if you think logically a wider might mean more users for your forum and better activity there.
It can help, but creating the profiles isn't enough.
Creating that Facebook page and twitter account are easy first steps, but you have to use them. Use them means not just posting your site link in every post and tweet every day. Post engaging content that isn't constantly trying to get people to click away from Facebook/twitter.
Post about discussions taking place on your forum, updates you've rolled out, any other changes, etc. and also talk about news or interesting things in your niche (whatever it may be) without necessarily making a tie to your forum in every mention of your niche.
Finally, as pandaa mentioned, you need quality followers on your pages. Seek out people who are interested, follow them, and hope they follow back. Don't pay for followers, they're only bots and do nothing for you other than make your account look like spam.
Do not rely on this being a primary promotional method. One of the reasons is because of some of the advice that the other members have provided you with. Another reason that I would give is because you may waste too much time on this method, many social media sites may have the target audience you want but some of these people will not be very high quality posters because of how popular text talk is and how ingrained it can be. Do you really want people casually posting with text talk?
The answer is no, you don't want trashy posts.
If you are going to do this, ensure that you, as Geoffrey said, post regular updates about significant events on your forums or just new and popular discussions. Finally, for your sake, utilize the tag systems integrated within the sites.
If you use those social exchange sites you won't notice much of a difference on your forum as most people will just follow you for the coins so that they can get followers.
