It took quite a while after first putting up our feeders (we have two, one for seeds and one for peanuts) before we started to get significant numbers of birds visiting them. And I think one reason they do reasonably well is that we've hung them from the fence on one side of the garden where our neighbour has bushes and an apple tree, so there are branches and leaf cover for them to fly up into when between pecks at the feeder. (My mother suggested this - they have a feeder on a pole in the hedge so the birds can fly down into the hedge and up to the feeder, and they get a lot of birds, though they're in the country rather than suburbia which makes a difference.)