Making people engage in your content?

You need to 'seed' the page. What I mean is that you need to create a bunch of fake profiles and post responses / messages as those profiles in order to give the impression that the site is active. This may sound a little underhanded but actually lots and lots of sites get started this way.

Problem with fake profiles is that I have to actually spend 5 minutes creating email addresses for verification purposes for each fake profile. So if I want to create 15 fake profiles, 15 fake profiles x 5 minutes = 75 minute.....ugh... Is there an easy way to build up activity?

Give something away for people to start posting on your forum. This might get more signs ups, or do a facebook post and promote it for people to go to your site.

You might try running some contest to get people to upload and interact more. Or like others have suggested, you might just have to create your own profiles yourself to stimulate activity - or hiring someone else to do it. Either way, you gotta figure out something to get some fire under your sites...soon...or truth is that your social sites won't live to see any success with any lifeblood: Social Activity.

Definitely try running contests on your site. Run vote contests to get your contributors to get more people to visit your site. Offer a really cool prize to the images with the most votes. Run photo contests to get more content for your site. (Use a really easy app like Wishpond's http://wshe.es/1aI6kBC to make your contest look professional)

Promote the contest on all your other social sites, email, and google/ fb/ twitter ads

Hey,

I am not sure if your problem in content, but try to use below information. May be it helps.

Do not understand why most of your customers even do not read to the end...

Right now, I want to create content to fill up the space on the site but I don't want to create too much content, just enough to create the "spark". My main focus is to build up the base. Building up the users. Once I have lots of users who are on the page, they will engage in the content and hopefully create more content. It's like a new store opening. If the store is filled with merchandise, it will be overwhelming. You need to have enough merchandise to make the store look active. When customers come, they will have enough space to look around and be interested in the products. When more customers come, then the business can bring in more products and expand the space if needed.

So yes, I am considering contests but contests are useless if you have little customer base. Contests are only good if you have lots of people that can engage and spread the contest around. The only things that work are free stuff and discounts but I don't offer that on my page.

@Anthem40 - I'm not lazy. There's a difference between between being lazy and being efficient. I take ideas and I organize the ideas into which idea will be more productive and efficient for the site. Ever watched the show, House MD on FOX? House is given lots of ideas but he usually picks the ideas that won't waste time, that are productive, and that will save his patient and get to a diagnoses and resolution quicker. He picks ideas that will get him to an answer. That's how I work. if my ideas don't work, than I consider the other ideas offered to me.

In this case, I have two options for you:

#1. Create fake but "realistic to the point" profiles
#2. Hire people to do multiple comments on your post

In this way, real people may start getting some engagement with your content, as long it is valuable and worth of their time. This may be time consuming, but remember that this is "business", and the results you expect may just come slowly but surely, and may grow in the end. Just don't get lazy on this, take action and do your thing!

If you dont mind then can i have a look at your site ?