Tips to Build a Great Online Community
Tips to Build a Great Online CommunityAmong various benefits, communities can help businesses convert your followers into engaged evangelists, generate traffic to your website, help you retain consumers, and raise your income. Check out these tips on how to build a great online community.
In This Article:
- What Is an Online Community?
- Tips on Building an Online Community
-
- Set Your Management Team
- Identify Your Goal and Purpose
- Choose & Build a Community Platform
- Set the Rules for Your Community
- Give It Time
- Get Your Community Involved
- Create Great Educational Blog and Content
Great Online Community Brings Great Success
What Is an Online Community?
An online community is a collection of individuals who communicate with one another using an online platform. These communities can range from a 10-person group of coffee lovers who talk about their favorite coffee shop to a 1 million-people community.
There are various types of community, so having a certain degree of understanding is the first step in building an online community.
Though the traditional community (also known as focus group) has its own advantage as it’s effective to collect information in a form of qualitative research with a group of people. People in the group can freely share their opinion of the research and each session lasts about two hours and between 8 to 12 participants.
On the other hand with online communities the limitation of time and participants has been completely eliminated. Through a series of interactive research activities such as polls, image markups, discussion boards, and multimedia exercises, questions are addressed to the full group of participants and/or in private, one-on-one exchanges. Participants can easily interact with the moderator and each other with their computer or mobile devices making it both flexible and accessible.
Tips on Building an Online Community
Set Your Management Team
Just like any other community, an online community needs to have a good management team. You need to have team members be carefully assigned and in charge of specific tasks in running your community.
Community management is important to the success of the community. Think of them as the community’s COO. It is their responsibility to ensure that everything is functioning well.
Identify Your Goal and Purpose
People will have no idea why they should join your community if it lacks a purpose. To find the goal and purpose you should answer the question: “what experience does it provide to its customers?”
For instance, your community is for people who enjoy traveling and looking for information like tips and tricks to go around the place, or good restaurants with reasonable prices. Your goal is to provide them with firsthand information that would otherwise be difficult to get online. The members will be able to share their experiences, and recommendations on which attractions, and hostels they should visit.
Choose & Build an Online Community Platform
With a purpose and goal in mind, the next step is to determine how big you want to grow your community. With various platforms out there the possibility is endless, which can also be very overwhelming. So in case, you don’t know which platform to choose, why not get your website for your community members.
PhpFox provides you with many built-in social features, PhpFox helps you to build your desired community to promote your brand and your business. The platform is highly customizable, so personalizing your community is not a problem.
Set the Rules for Your Community
The next step is setting up the rules or general guidelines that the community members should follow.
Depending on your services and products, you should create categories within your community that demonstrate how they are a perfect answer to a community member’s concerns. This may also assist you to identify which community members are most frequently interacting with various categories, and what goods would be most suited for them.
Give It Time
As the saying goes “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, so is your online community. Building a community around your brand takes time, but it creates a long-lasting relationship between your business and customers. Therefore, you should be patient and let your community grow naturally.
If you try to rush things, people will notice that which can backfire really quickly. So it’s better to have a slowly growing number of loyal customers.
Get Your Community Involved
Gaining the attention and getting the members of your online community to interact and involve is one of the quickest ways to grow your community. By having them share their thoughts of pictures, videos, or join in a virtual event will let them see that you have an active community.
For example, you can create an event in which members of your community share videos, whichever has the most comments, views, and likes is the winner of a certain prize. By doing this you will passively encourage them to tag their friends.
Create Great Educational Blog and Content
Last but not least, giving customers more information via email and blog postings may be an excellent approach to grow a community. Include some perks and promotions along the way to keep your open/click rates high.
This added value is crucial because customers will not perceive your service/product to be overpriced if they hear from you on a frequent basis with relevant information. As a result, boosting your brand image as a bonus
Online communities boost brand recognition, lead generation, and conversions. These communities may become one of your most potent marketing platforms if they have a defined purpose and are moderated properly. Their ability to connect businesses and customers makes them a tried-and-true marketing strategy for businesses in almost any industry.
So what are you waiting for? With phpFox you will be able to start your very own online community with ease. We offer you the OPTIMAL package for setting up along with various services to build your ideal online community. Give us a CALL, or leave a MESSAGE at hello@phpfox.com