Those who have recently visited UK Business Forums, our leading small business community, will have noticed some rather dramatic changes. The forums have received a fresh new look with a responsive design, increased user functionality to boost engagement and enhanced advertising delivery to support campaigns across the platform.
UK Business Forums is the UK’s largest and most active online community of small businesses. Each month over 450,000 unique visitors engage with the site, generating 35 new posts every hour and nearly 2 million page views. Sift Media acquired the forums in August 2007 when there were 4,000 members and 27,000 threads. Upon its re-launch last week there were 211,000 members and 237,000 threads! While we’re proud of the way the site has developed (and has been brilliantly steered by our dedicated Community Managers), it is the members themselves who are its greatest asset and them that we must thank for its success.
New mobile advertising and campaign opportunities
Some might say if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Indeed the reality was that the ‘old’ UK Business Forums site was clearly functional, evidenced by the high level of member engagement, but it was lacking some important features and was far from pretty. The new site layout, navigation and overall user experience has been designed to build upon current engagement levels across the community. Furthermore, the new platform on which the forum is built (Xenforo, for those interested in the tech behind the scenes!) gives us much greater scope for what we can do with it in the future, such as adding on additional features, etc.
With its new responsive design, UK Business Forums will better cater for the needs of the 20%+ of visitors who use the site on a mobile device. Following our investment in mobile publishing and advertising solutions, we’re offering new interactive campaign opportunities for our clients to better engage with our mobile users, creating wider reach and more targeted solutions.
What next?
As the dust settles on the re-launch, the team are busy working toward Phase 2 of the UK Business Forums plan, which will see the forums geared towards the content on the site. A new section will be added, focusing on longer-form content, with articles from our own editorial team as well as contributors from across different sectors, including community members. UK Business Forums is built on the wealth of knowledge and experience that our members bring to the site each day and we want to make sure that the best content is also the easiest to find.
Phase 2 is currently planned to go live in the first quarter of 2014, with previews happening before then.
To find out more about the exciting developments at UK Business Forums, or discuss how you can align your brand with the UK’s largest and most engaged online small business community, download a media pack now or contact Yiuwin Tsang on 0117 915 8636 or email yiuwin.tsang@siftmedia.co.uk.