How To Build An Online Community For Your Business
Building an online community can bring many benefits to your business from both a reputational and financial perspective. But building an engaged and thriving community takes a lot of work and consistency.
If you’re thinking of building an online community for your business, here are some tips to get you started.
What is a community?
There are many different types of online communities across a number of platforms. They are usually drawn there by shared interests, professions, or issues. From groups supporting mothers like Embrace Grace to those for film fans to discuss the latest releases, it’s hard to think of a topic that you won’t be able to find an online community for. And if you can’t find one, there’s your niche to get started.
These communities might share resources, take training, give advice, or discuss relevant issues.
Benefits of building a community
Brands and individuals build communities for a variety of reasons. These include:
- Building a reputation as a subject expert or influencer in the space
- Attract leads to convert to business
- Increasing engagement and retention in the existing customer base
The goal of most community founders is to monetize their audience in some way through training, direct selling or even moving to a paid access model for the community.
How to build your community
You’re not going to build a community by accident, so the first thing you will need to do is to define exactly what type of community you’re creating and what you want to achieve. Make your goals SMART so you can reliably and consistently track your growth.
Rather than immediately focus on growth or monetization, you need to build a community based on shared values. This involves bringing people together with a shared sense of purpose or common goals. People need to feel like they’re a part of a community, can contribute to it, and are valued as part of it.
You also need to establish clear rules on how people can interact with the community. Most have expected guidelines such as no hate speech, no self-promotion, or MLM. Individual groups need their own rules, otherwise, they become almost impossible to manage.
Tracking the progress of your community
How can you tell if your community is successful? Establish KPIs that you can track on a regular basis. Common KPIs to track include:
- Growth
- Number of users
- Lost users (churn)
- New users
- Engagement
- Likes and comments
- Total percentage of users engaged
- Inactive users
- Business goals
- Number of sign-ups
- Number of orders
- Referrals
Choose your community platform
Where you host yours is very important. It’s easy to assume that you’ll use a popular platform such as LinkedIn or Facebook. These do have many advantages, but there are a lot of other platforms out there designed for this purpose that have a great array of features you can take advantage of (such as course hosting, etc). Additionally, a lot of brands are wanting to move away from Facebook due to their own social and political view about the company.
Popular alternatives include
- Thinkific
- Mighty Network
- Circle
These platforms are not only great for your community but also serve as important parts of the marketing funnel for you and offer built-in payment gateways You’re also not at the mercy of algorithms or other sudden changes to how things are done.
One of the main drawbacks of using a platform away from Facebook and LinkedIn is the unfamiliarity with the new products. Downloading new apps and creating new accounts could put some people off. As these platforms become more popular, this will be less of an issue.
Perfect your onboarding content
A great introduction to your community could mean the difference between someone becoming a profitable member or just drifting away in a few weeks.
These welcome messages should serve to make people feel special, a valued part of the community as well as encouraging them to engage with your content or other services. Think about introducing new members on a regular basis so that existing members can start interacting with them immediately.
Create a content calendar
Keeping your community filled with content can be a full time job. That’s why it’s important to plan in advance. Think about having specific themes for days of the week that you run regularly.
Your calendar should be a mixture of various types of content, rather than simply a promotional vehicle for your products or services.
Final thoughts
Creating a thriving community is a goal for many businesses, but takes a lot of dedicated work. Keep these tips in mind when planning yours.