Live chat on website to increase visits

[Oracle]

While looking for new ideas to get more visitors to my website I came across this website that provides a live chat so people can talk amongst themselves.


http://totalfpl.com/pricechanges


I would be interested to know what the people on here would make of the pros and cons of this feature.


My website is geared towards sports betting so there are specific times when this could get extremely busy, specifically Saturday 3pm GMT and I think it would be a great feature to get people to come to my website to have a chat with people who have the same interest and possibly recommend my website to their friends, ect.


Any links on how to get this software, expense involved in running this, ect, would be appreciated.

[edgarf76]

There is a link in the widget. It looks interesting but looks more for show than really interacting with the reader.

[universal4]

Here is more info on how to start
http://chatango.com/help?help_about#free

It does look like it's free for people to chat and have accounts, but then you also have to get past the visitors objection to signing up for a chat account at a site they no nothing about.

However, what I saw on the site you posted, if what took so long for the home page to load was the chat box I would be concerned. I jumped around a few pages and it seemed that there was a bit of a speed issue so I would consider doing some speed tests with and without the chat.

It could end up just being the kind of sticky content that your readers like, or it could work against you in that someone could hang out and try and poach punters....

Here would be questions that I would want answered or would consider to watch while testing the feature.

Obviously watching speed, since these are external scripts pulling content from other servers, that has to be fully downloaded by the visitor before pages on YOUR website are rendered.

Would you see any tangible results right away?
Did it take a while before visitors accepted it, or would you see chat growth almost immediately?

Good luck with this.

Rick
Universal4

[Oracle]

All good points Rick. A website could require an extremely large number of visitors to get regular conversation on this and there would almost certainly be poaching going on even if I managed to ban links that is easy to get around however my site would be better than 99% of the poachers so I wouldn't be too worried about that.

I'm liking the idea a lot less today than I was yesterday but its not dead in the water just yet.

[xecutable]

It's a good way to make people interact in a perfect world, where everyone would get along and share information. Of course you can meet new friends perhaps, and it's something that can make people keep coming back to that site just for the interaction which would be huge plus.

However, what happens if someone gets bullied around, and quits forever just because someone has been a real douche to him. I wouldn't really wanna lose even 1 visitor, because some random idiot had a bad day and decided to take it on him. If there's going to be chat, there definitely have to be at least 2-3 moderators to be able to prevent such things.

Otherwise it would turn into a lot of spam and advertising, arguing and stuff like that. Bottom line is, you would never know before you try it, so go ahead and good luck with it.