4 ways to grow your forum

I work at a web design and development company that manages its many clients' corporate social media. This is a short summary of what I think are the most important activities that can help a forum like this to grow its userbase. I am not trying to tell anybody how to run their forum ;) just sharing my work knowhow. 1-Enable the active users. You should select the best users in your site and upgrade them to moderators. This helps your community by making it much easier for you to make it free of spam and also gives the community a sense of ownership. An enabled community will talk about, share and +1 your community forum more and this will help the community add more users. 2-Accept topic diversity. Removing off-topic comments offends the poster and such off-topic pages could be indexed in google and create for you some traffic from search terms that you would nototherwise get at all. Keep off-topic posts or move them to an off-topic section, but do not delete them. I have seen that keeping such posts can increase your traffic by up to 25%. 3-Encourage the Loyal users You do not need to give giftsat all, all you need is to say kind words of appreciation to the specific individuals by name in your replies to them. Words such “Thanks for the excellent post as usual.” or such make a big difference. 4-Every person is a troll sometimes Sometimes a person has just had a bad day (not all people are single lol). Sometimes certain phrases will bring out the worst in a person. Do not judge by the first time, give a guy a break and do not revoke their membership from the first sign of trolling.