Building a Community

This blog post serves as a complete guide for launching a thriving online community.

Community-building is not an overnight thing, and if you think it can be, you will fail. But, this post lists the necessary steps to create and launch your own branded online community!

What is an Online Community?

To put it briefly, an online community is a network of loosely connected people through the internet who share at least one common interest. These groups interact on social media sites, message boards, and websites. Community members come together and discuss issues that affect them, share knowledge and experiences, or just talk about their favorite topic.

An example of an online community is Reddit. This popular social news site has multiple "subreddits," each devoted to a specific topic such as technology or politics.

These subreddits are moderated by the community, meaning that users have the power to remove posts or comments that break the rules. There are currently over 2.8 million subreddits, so there's certainly a topic for everyone.

Why Should You Consider Building An Online Community?

Having an active and engaged audience is now imperative for any online business, as explained by Forbes in 2020. An online community can help you increase brand awareness, strengthen customer loyalty, and improve your lead generation efforts.

Online communities can help you establish that valuable connection with customers unlike anything else out there on the web. Having a dedicated space on the internet to allow users to interact with one another about your product or service is beneficial in many ways:

• Improved customer service
• Lower costs on advertising
• Increased brand awareness
• Highly qualified leads because of the trust established within the community built around your brand

Having an online community around your brand also helps establish your company's authority in the industry. It can help you become a thought leader in your field and allows customers to engage with one another about how unique your brand is!

Reach Generation-Z Users

Many industry experts believe that the future of social media marketing is in online communities. Users who are part of an online community are typically more engaged than users on any other type of social media platform. They're also more likely to support your brand and even purchase from you!

Generation Z, which is currently larger than both the Millennial and Baby Boomer generations, craves community and belongingness. This demographic is quickly replacing the Baby Boomers in terms of their buying power, with an estimated $143 billion in 2018.

Creating Your Online Community

Now that we understand the importance of building an online community in terms of brand awareness, customer retention, and lead generation, it's time to see how we can bring one to fruition.

There are many options available for companies who want to create an online community, and it's not always as simple as starting a Facebook or Twitter account.

Regardless of your niche or business model, there are a few steps required to start your own online community:

Identify your goals and vision for the community

The first step is to identify what you want the community to achieve. Your goals must be realistic and achievable within a set timeframe. You don't want to plan a large-scale launch only to have it fail, which will reflect poorly on your brand.

This step is also where you decide on the topic of your online community. When it comes to picking a topic, consider what's relevant to your brand and have an active audience interested in interacting with each other.

Define your audience and niche

Before you create your platform, you need to know who it's for and what they care about. You also need to understand how the audience would like the community to run. If you're creating a company account on Twitter or Facebook, be sure that your social media bio clearly states that it is an official space for customers to engage with each other.

The best way to identify your target audience is to write down questions relevant to your product or service. Following this, ask the audience you identified the questions and record their answers. For example:

• How old are they?
• What devices do they use to access social media?
• Do they like reading long or short posts, and why?
• What type of content would be most appealing to them and why?
• What type of incentives would entice them to join the community and why?

Asking your customers about their preferences will give you a better idea of who you're targeting and what success will look like. You can use surveys, polls, and questionnaires to find out what motivates your audience the most when engaging in online communities.

Select the right platform to host your community

Next, you need to decide on the platform that best suits your online community. Some business owners content themselves with creating a community on established social media platforms, while others choose to create a standalone platform.

Before you make your decision, take the time to think about whether or not it's even necessary for your community to have its website or domain name. After all, starting a social media page is much easier and cheaper than building an entire website from scratch.

Free Community Platforms

If you want to quickly launch an online community without incurring extra costs, one of the easiest ways is to create a group on Facebook. This way, customers can interact with each other no matter where they are located or what device they are using.

Other free community platforms include:

• Reddit: Ideal for niche topics
• Twitter: Perfect for discussing something in real-time
• LinkedIn: Targets professionals and businesses
• Twitch: Main option for a gaming community
• Instagram: Great for a visual community
• Medium: A good option for writers who are looking to build an audience
• Quora: Good option for experts in their field.

Owning Your Community Platform

An alternative to hosting your community on a free platform is to build your own. The benefits of choosing this route include:

• Being in more control of the content on your website.
• Having greater authority on search engine results pages.
• Having complete ownership of all interactions and communications on your site, including user-generated content.
• Having greater flexibility to change the way it looks and its functionality.

Of course, owning a community platform will be a more costly endeavor. Luckily, plenty of companies will do the legwork for you.

Assemble your team

Now that you've determined your audience, platform, and goals for your online community, it's time to assemble the team that will help make this vision a reality. Your team should consist of at least one member from each of these three departments:

Community management drives conversation between customers on the platform, often through live chats or questions polls.

Legal (moderators) is essential to ensure bullying, hate speech, and other harmful behaviors aren't allowed on the page.

Marketing ensures that said conversations are tracked and shared through paid Facebook or Twitter ads. They also make it possible for your community members to join together to participate in contests and other events.

CTO's are responsible for giving these community managers the tools to help content circulate. This may include a designated place where conversations can occur or even an exclusive members-only area.

Make it mobile-friendly

The number of users accessing the internet through their cell phones is only growing larger. The most recent statistics show that 70% of users visit social media sites primarily from their mobile devices.

This means that if you're operating a community platform, it's essential that your website or application is optimized for smaller screens.

How To Run A Successful Online Community

After successfully creating your online community, it's time to maintain and promote it. This includes encouraging and engaging in conversations with your audience, hosting contests and giveaways to spread brand awareness, and taking an active role in monitoring the community.

Community management is all about getting people to interact with each other. Build trust by staying positive and avoiding controversial topics that might divide or upset members of your online community.

Make a plan for success

Have a plan and timeline for success before you launch your online community. This means setting specific goals around traffic, engagement, and monetization. You should organize your online community so that it can grow alongside your business strategy.

It's also important to regularly assess the results of each campaign or initiative so that you can make any necessary changes to achieve maximum engagement. Separate your objectives into different steps and milestones. This way, you'll be able to track your progress and celebrate each milestone achieved throughout the process.

Establish rules for community management

Create a list of rules and guidelines for community managers on communicating with members within the community. These rules should also describe how to deal with issues within the community, including cyber-bullying, hate speech, and any other undesirable interactions.

Begin with a soft launch

Before you launch your online community, start it out as a soft launch. This means limiting access to just a handful of users relevant to the platform and audience. Ensure that any kinks have been ironed out before launching the site to the general public.

Doing a soft launch will help you take the time to establish best practices and policies for community management. This will include creating a list of rules, introducing the purposes and benefits of your online community, and determining what types of posts or comments violate these rules. By establishing a safe online space for community members, you'll create a strong sense of trust among your user base that will encourage them to continue joining.

Create engaging content

One of the best ways to keep users engaged within your community is to post relevant and top-of-mind content. This could be through images, blog posts, videos, or podcasts.

If you don't have the resources to create new content daily, then try out user-generated content. Allow users of your community platform to submit their content. This can be anything from photos to videos to memes.

The important thing to remember here is that quality presides over quantity.

Set goals and measure success

Just like with anything you do, it's important to set goals and define what success looks like. This is especially true for creating your community, as your goals will drive everything from platform choice and topic to audience size and participation levels. It's beneficial for each team member who is involved in the creation of your community to share their goals and ideas.

You can use Google Analytics, along with other tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social, to track the success of your community.

Incorporate incentives and gamification

Once you launch your platform, take time to brainstorm different ways to incentivize your audience to participate in discussions, post comments, follow other users, etc. Promoting giveaways or special events is a great way to encourage people to sign up for your community.

On the other hand, gamification is a strategy that uses game-like mechanics to encourage your community members to participate. This could be by rewarding top posters with titles or badges, designing quizzes or polls, or even integrating elements of chance into the platform.

Monitor platform activity and performance

It's essential to monitor the activity in your community after you launch it. Make sure that the platform can scale with your audience; otherwise, you might have difficulty keeping up with demand. If there are any bugs or other problems present in your platform report

How To Promote Your Online Community?

There are many different ways that you could promote your community. It all comes down to what content resonates best with your audience and if your budget allows for non-organic promotion. Some ways to promote your online community are:

Link building

Link building is an effective way of promoting your community to search engines. Your goal should be to connect with people and brands important in your industry and have them link back to your website. This will, in turn, increase the number of visitors to your community and help you move up in search engine rankings.

Social media promotion

You can also promote your online community on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. You should create posts that encourage people to join or contribute to the community. If you're having trouble finding relevant users to follow or retweet your content, consider using @mentions to connect with them directly.

Paid ads

Another way of promoting your online community is through paid ads. Create consistent captivating posts on platforms like Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, Instagram Ads, Google AdWords, and LinkedIn Ads. The key here is to find the right balance between visual and copy.

Paid ads also rely heavily on testing different audiences and copy to find the highest converting ad ultimately. You can define your target audience by location, age, gender, interests, keywords, etc.

Press release distribution

You could also promote your online community by creating a press release about it, an ideal tool for getting out news, announcements, updates, etc. It's also an excellent opportunity to position your brand as an industry leader in relation to your competition.

Making sure that you have a well-written piece of content is important, as it will increase the chances of your press release being picked up by a media outlet.

Affiliate marketing and influencers

It would be best if you also tried to get your audience involved in the promotion of your online community. Try to find influencers with a large following and connect with them to create content around your community.

If you're having trouble developing creative ways to promote your community, consider asking your audience for ideas. People enjoy being a part of the conversation, so providing the opportunity to contribute will increase their interest in it.

Be prepared to scale

Finally, it's important to be prepared for the amount of traffic you could potentially receive after launching your community. Ensure that your servers can handle the increase in load and often check to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Conclusion

Building and promoting an online community can be a great way to engage your audience and share information about your brand. Not only will you be reaching a larger number of people, but the data that you get from your platform will also help to improve your business.

By understanding the needs of your audience and what they want out of your community, you can create an environment where everyone feels comfortable contributing or participating. This will ultimately lead to more exposure for your brand and allow people to share the content they love with their friends.