I've been resourcing the success of a lot of communities growing via word of mouth, and quite frankly, I'm at lost at to how some really grow via word of mouth... How do we grow via word of mouth? Well, I think most communities grow via word of mouth because the users just love the place and tell their friends about it - and it just continues... However, what steps can you take to help make growing word of mouth even more powerful? Do you implement referral systems, link to us pages - and more? I believe one key aspect of word of mouth is having very nice banners, and buttons that users can use to help you promote your community and without them, it'll be hard for them to help promote the community unless they're just talking about the site on other communities, yes?

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Virtual Pet Sites - Myspace Editors-web games

I think you touched on the most powerful word of mouth tool for forums - and that is your community. You have got to make sure that your members absolutely love it in your forums. You want them to become addicted to your forums - Once they're addicted, not only do you have people who visit often, but you have people who are telling their friends to get addicted also.

Other than that, the next biggest thing is a viral marketing idea. Doing viral marketing is having something on your site that is unique but also encourages your members to tell others because they will benefit from it. An example of this is PostFusion. It's unique. But more importantly, PF users are encouraged to tell their friends - because the more people that you can get into PF, the better it's going to be.

There are other ways to gain more members, but you asked specifically about word of mouth...and those are two good ways to increase word of mouth advertising.

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...some super-sweet signature

Word of mouth is how I run my work here in town. I have customers call me through customers that I dealt with months ago. Word of mouth is definitely the best form of advertising as it's free and it's because people really do like your service. Obviously forums is a little different depending on each forum. I get all my members for my claims site via word of mouth.

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TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

Excellent, so your new customers tend to tell their friends as well?

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Virtual Pet Sites - Myspace Editors-web games

This is happening with my Forum - we done a bit of promotion to start off with, but now when we get introduction posts, they say my friend referred me to this site & it looks awesome.

This has happened on some other forums also, where someone asks for a graphic request - a member of our board will say Xanthom Designs will do this for free and link.

So this is working really well for us.

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Immortality will come to such as are fit for it

The features like Book of The Month Club and Scavenger Hunt have worked for bringing people into our forum via word of mouth. In fact we even had an author from one of our books join up although she was not very engaging - the point is she somehow found out about our selection of her book and she signed up just say thanks for choosing her book. It's spurred an interest among club members to specifically invite authors to join up.

We've heard back from a couple people that they heard of us via word fo mouth - I think that's awesome!

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Where's Waldo?, Book Club, Scavenger Hunt, Role Playing, Travel Guide, Photos, Videos and more.
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Yup. I work for a Natural Gas company that deals with residential and commercial users. They get benefits for telling their friends about it as well but it serves as a mutual benefit for everyone. The person spreading the word gains something, new person gains something by coming and ultimately you gain someone as a new client.

Put it this way, are you more likely to buy something that a good friend tells you about or that you saw on TV. Most likely you're going to trust what someone close to you says over some advertisement. It's just human nature to listen to someone close to us. It's also better advertisement as that person (sometimes) is not gaining anything for telling that person yet they do it anyways which makes the other person more inclined to look into it because a party that has nothing to gain from it has told them about it.

Just like when you see a good movie or play a good video game. Your friends will likely listen to you over any TV advertisement or what not.

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TheBiggestBoards - See where your forum ranks - Size Matters!

The trick for a forum is not to let it get too cliquey. If everyone knows everyone else then new comers feel alientaed from the first click. I've seen this happen to a few very good forums. The community develops, things start to gel, posts galore, then a small group of people try to decide what a "meaningful post" should be, post their opinions, berate others for making "meaningless posts" and the community just dissolves. Sad. That's one of the dangers of word of mouth - people may become a little too familiar.

A good balance of word of mouth and people finding forums through searching seems to work well. As for me, I have never visited a forum based on word of mouth. Every single one I've found through searching. Including this one.

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Ed Womack
Get Milked

Agreed - I think it remains the responsibility of staff to be welcoming of ALL new members and to engage them on thier own terms. Ryan does a great job of that here in the Introductions section - he often picks a statement of two made in somebody's intro thread and asks questions to engage them and get them rolling.

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Where's Waldo?, Book Club, Scavenger Hunt, Role Playing, Travel Guide, Photos, Videos and more.
TalkWhatever.com - Blogs, Social Groups and Forum

I feel that you can't really do much with word of mouth when it comes to anything online. You can't really control it or buy it, you just hope for it. Do everything you can to make visitors tell their friends about your website. For as far as directly telling the visitors, except for having a friendly "tell your friends!" message, you can't really do much.

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