Online Community
Build your community before you need them
By Robin Anderson
Do you remember when you signed up for an Instagram, or Facebook account? Everyone started at zero - zero followers. You quickly add a few friends and family members. And over time you gradually built up a following. It was easy, as people knew who you were. Now imagine that no one knows who you are, how do you get people to follow you, and more importantly how long does it take to build a community?
Save yourself time, energy, and aggravation. Get started building your online community before you need the customers.
What is an online community?
An online community can be defined as a group of individuals unified by common interests, opinions, and goals who meet in a virtual space.
The benefits of building an online community early includes:
Get feedback from members - they will also share new product ideas & feature requests
Use it to prioritize future updates based on the feedback as to the importance of different features
Listen to your members. Communicate with them on an ongoing basis. By doing so you’ll build a foundation of future customers increasing their loyalty. Use this as a way to encourage them to be brand ambassadors for you.
An active member base helps to prove viability for your product which you can then use as a driver to demonstrate traction for fundraising.
How to build an online community
Get ahead of the game by building your online presence before you really need it. To do so, start with Why. What is the purpose?
Is it for testing product ideas or to prove product/market fit?
Are you planning to use it for beta testing to help guide product design/development?
Identify early adopters, and/or influencers?
Get testimonials for marketing purposes, or to demonstrate customer traction?
Whatever your primary reason for creating and building your community, pinpoint that upfront, and use that as your driver to build your community. As with anything involving future customers, you’ll find members are more willing to participate when you give more than you receive. Show the value of being a part of your community. Be helpful, engage with them, be open and transparent. Above all, listen. Value the feedback that your members share. And finally, be patient. Don’t require feedback, rather encourage it. The results you get will be far more helpful than a simple feature priority list. You’ll have an array of insights, and a future customer base to build and sell your product.
Before you begin building, identify who will be responsible for managing and generally participating in the community. One person has to be designated as your community manager to make sure it gets the time and attention required to make it successful. Marketing is required for promotional purposes to get it off the ground and grow. Assign this responsibility to someone. Engineering or product management will need to also be a part of the team as they will be the ones interested in the use, experiences, and feature reviews within the community.
It’s hard to attract and engage individuals, so your community may be your future customer’s first experience with your company. As a result, the experience needs to be amazing. Your goal is to build trust and loyalty. Do that by having meaningful conversations. That requires time, attention, and interaction with your audience.
Where to build your online community
There are a variety of places to begin building your community. The most common are:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
TikTok
Discord
To determine the right place for you, look at your personas. Where your target audience spends most of their time will help you decide the best place to build your community. Take a look at this if you need help in figuring out the right place to start. You’ll get details and demographics as to why people use Instagram and Facebook.
Content and Communications
Prior to launching, map the types of information or content needed to help entice members and encourage interactions among those who join. Since a community is based on those who share a common interest, create content that allows members to share their knowledge and experience. To help maintain civility, post guidelines for members that include the rules for participating, details about expectations regarding behavior, your complaint/resolution process, and your zero tolerance policy - everyone is welcomed. Be consistent with communications and your messaging, and be considerate of the time and inquiries to and from members. Reach out and get feedback regarding ways to improve their experience.
Initial Members
To help get your community off the ground, invite friends, family, associates, anyone who would be interested in participating. Encourage your early members to invite others. You may want to cap the initial number of members in an effort to keep your community small, making it easier to interact, and have meaningful conversations to gain insights. This will depend on your goals. When you are ready to grow, create posts your members can share on social media, and highlight the community in your newsletter and on your website. Make it easy to join.
Attracting New and Retaining Members
Welcome new members. Once you have established your community, you may want to keep a thread of discussions available for new members to review so that they can get ‘up to speed’ on where the product is at and the direction it is moving. Conduct regular chats to gain insights as to use, or interest. Encourage your members to share their thoughts and ideas to connect with others as this helps grow your community and participation. Consider offering rewards - badges, perks, swag, discounts, for testing new features, new versions (such as a beta), or contributing new ideas for product use. Thank your members for their contributions. The greater the interaction and participation, the greater the retention and valuable info/insights you’ll gain.
Increased engagement on community sites can result in up to 25% increase in revenue. And friend recommendations are the number one influencing factor in purchase decisions.
Measurement
Set some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your community, such as number of members, new member growth (compare this month to last), and number of feature or product recommendations. Setting data goals will help you to monitor the effectiveness of your community to help you with growth.
Community is not built, it is ‘earned.’ - Francisco Rosales, SocialMouths
Building a community takes patience and time. However, when you do this right, you’ll gain a great loyal customer base that helps you build higher quality and more desirable products, resulting in an increase in revenue. A win for all.
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FunFact Friday
Early online communities started with Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). In 1978, Chicago’s great blizzard led to the acceleration and use of BBSs. They were online communities run by locals that provided applications and files for download and a forum for messaging. The ability to share information made BBSs a precursors to social media networks.