Best Practices for Online Communities

Blog

Are you actively building and sustaining an online community for your brand?

Community building and management are critical tools in any digital marketing effort, and you may not be giving your online community enough attention if you’re like most businesses.

What is an online community?

It’s any group or database that requires specific community content creation and management efforts on behalf of a brand. This includes website forums, FAQ documents, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Patreons, Spotify idea forms, contact forms, affiliate communities, and MORE.

Let’s explore why and how you can make these valuable digital marketing tools work for you.

The Why

If you’re skeptical about the value of online communities and whether they’re worth the effort, consider the following:

Humanization: Online communities expose the humans behind your brand. This builds trust and connection between you and your audience—increasing image, loyalty, and traffic conversion.

Access to Feedback: By engaging with willing online community members, you’ll get honest feedback and ideas from your most loyal (and even the most unhappy) customers. We espouse that “feedback is love,” and we love to hear from everyone in our clients’ communities, even the occasional troll.

Complaints: It’s not lost on us that sometimes consumer complaints are frustrating and unreasonable. Consider that an angry customer might help you see quality issues in your product or a critical missing segment of your customer journey. Is there a better way to get solid qualitative information than by engaging with consumers? Leveraging an online community can provide an exceptional opportunity to display your company’s stellar customer service. (If your customer service isn’t stellar? Get to work on THAT – STAT!)

Customer Support: Customer support is made easy with online communities. Leave an individual or team of solid community managers in charge, and watch your credibility and connections soar when your customers figure out they can count on timely responses from a real person who’s eager to help.

Expanded Value: When you see online communities as a way to create connected, positive relationships between your brand and your consumers, you’re free to develop an entirely new level of value. Amping up your customer support, community, information, and education are just the starting points.

The How of Online Communities

There’s no question that online communities can support, promote, and enhance brand image. Let’s chat about how to build and sustain yours.

Post/Prompt Often: In whatever form works best for you, your community manager or management team should regularly garner your audience’s attention. Helpful, useful content works best.

Converse: Spark conversation and have honest chats with your community members. Encourage them to share their experiences, ask questions, and further the connection.

ENGAGE: Engaging with your community goes above and beyond conversation and posting. Conduct giveaways, exchange perks for participation, and spotlight members. Be intentional and present to build the brand’s humanity in consumers’ minds.

Designate the RIGHT Community Manager: Your Community Manager should be personable, committed to the brand image, have a natural affinity for customer service, enjoy talking to people, be authentic, and be unafraid to use their voice on behalf of the brand.

PopSpeed® Can Help

You’ll hear us describe ourselves as the most enthusiastic people in the room (or, in our case, on the Zoom). Building and sustaining connections with online communities is one of the things we do best. Bring us on to create a community and amplify your brand. We can’t wait to connect with you!