There is a great variety of different online communities, but the process of how they all operate is quite alike. Online communities are hosted on various platforms for different goals. Before starting an online community, the purpose and the platform are the two most significant factors you need to think about.
Building an online community, regardless if it is used by colleagues to discuss work-related questions or support forums with help centers for your brand or even by town communities wanting to create a place to share all neighborhood news and issues, should be done on MyTalk.io community builder. Before building your online community, determine the reason you wish to bring the community together.
Consider the Goals
Once decided on the platform that allows creating a wide range of online community types, as a customer manager, marketing director or an owner of a business you must to choose the types of online community most suitable for your organization. Think about your business goals and how you can meet your target audience goals by building an online community for the brand.
Blogs for Business
Many businesses built their community on blogs. There is a vast range of business blogs that cover everything from broad matters to extremely niche blogs, which aim to address a narrow and specific part of a topic. Some business blogs provide case studies and inspirational essays of multi-billionaire company founders telling their path from failure to fame.
Some blogs are aimed to create a strong online community for your business by attracting new leads for your product or service. Blogs are always designed to engage with the users and followers. They are similar to diary entries with publishing date and meta tags. Regardless of the post type, the most important thing is the content. By composing an original, unique and appealing material, your business will persuade users to post comments and feedback, ask questions, which you can respond to as well as giving the opportunity for other followers to reply too.
To extend your online community created on your blog even further, you can post high-quality comments on other relevant blogs. Using an online community as an open and free environment for exchanging information, can help any company grow and improve.
Public Online Communities Based on Company Domain
Customers, fans, prospects can join a public owned online communities. All discussions, feedback, and posts remain on your domain; it is an excellent tool for search engine optimization or SEO.
However, the biggest obstacle to creating a prosperous public owned online community lays in awareness and marketing approach. Businesses prefer to use social networks, like Twitter or Facebook, to build their online communities as they are much easier to join. Also, the company can extend community around the brand and the content via natural channels of these open social networks.
A public owned online community gives access to a free service to your users. As a result, the business gets essential data from the followers and promotes itself as a trustworthy leader in the industry.
Private Online Communities
Most discussions, content, social features are accessible via a login and are connected to a membership database. Private online communities are usually used by business to business ( B2B) organizations. Such private online communities are a part of a company’s product strategy. They do not aim to create awareness as public social communities do.
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Public Social Networks
Social network websites, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others, have dramatically changed the way the businesses promote their products or services. Social media became an essential part of online community building, marketing, and customer service.
If you wish to create an active community around your brand, social media can be a great tool to use. It is a place where you can find current and potential customers and create groups. Social media can help your business to get assistance from your followers. Users like to share things, such as hot deals, interesting facts, stories and so on. You will also be able to increase brand loyalty. People, who follow their brand’s online community, remain very devoted and loyal to it.
Building trust in your business is one of the ways to use online communities to get and retain customers.
