5 Steps to Building and Maintaining an Online Community
 Aliza Sherman is a web pioneer, author, and international speaker. Sherman is the author of 8 books about the Internet including The Everything Blogging Book, Streetwise Ecommerce, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Crowdsourcing and Social Media Engagement for Dummies. |
5 Steps to Building and Maintaining an Online CommunitySocial media, by design, is based on the connections and interactions between people. People often use social media as a way to connect to communities of like-minded people. Online communities form in a variety of ways, sometimes organically, but typically by an individual or organization who uses a community forum platform to facilitate communications. As a small business owner, you could opt to host your own online community. An online community for your company could offer a number of benefits. Once you determine that you have the resources, especially the time, to manage and moderate an online community, you will have several steps to take before inviting people in. Here are the most common steps to prepare for hosting an online community. 1. Decide on the purpose Even though an online community can serve many purposes, you’ll have more success focusing on a single purpose to help get it off the ground. Some reasons to host an online community include:
Whichever direction you decide to go in, you’ll need to make sure you have the skills and processes to carry out that specific type of community. For example, if you are already providing customer service by phone and email, you most likely have the ability to translate that into responding to customer inquiries and complaints in a community setting. However, if you’ve never managed a focus group, you might not be able to effectively turn your online community into a consumer insights mechanism. You could, however, occasionally survey your community more informally and glean insights that way. 2. Pick the right platform There are many online platforms made specifically for community building or with community tools built in. Social networks typically offer a community forum feature such as Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Groups. If you are producing content on a regular basis, such as an email newsletter, using a tool such as Substack gives you additional community-building tools unlike the more traditional email software. If you are more technically inclined with a more technical customer base, sites like Reddit or Discord might be the right community-building platform for your company. The "right" platform can mean:
If you have a direct dialogue with your customers, you could also survey them to see which platform they currently use or prefer to decrease barriers of entry. 3. Determine the format When setting up your online community platform, you will be faced with a number of options including: Private or open - A private group will help you have more control over the community while an open one could be harder to manage. Moderated or unmoderated - A moderated group can mean anything from having moderators who initiate and keep an eye on conversations to a fully-moderated one where every post must go through an approval process. Unmoderated groups can become unruly and more time consuming but fully moderated ones can restrict conversations. Moderated ones with human moderators can be time consuming but can also help you get to know your community members. 4. Seed and weed You’ll need an onboarding process established to set the rules and expectations of your online community. Most community platforms provide prompts to set these up and a place for guidelines and rules during the initial signup process. For example, Facebook lets you list your community rules as someone signs up and even offers an option to have prospective members answer questions to weed out scammers. Once you have your community built and are inviting people in, you should have a plan for the message you will post to the community to encourage conversations. Treat your online community as a part of your overall social media marketing landscape. What you talk about within the community should inform what you are doing outside of it including what you post publicly. 5. Remove members if needed One common challenge of an online community is keeping the peace. You are managing people, most likely strangers, and personalities can clash. When you set community rules in advance, include details about how disruptions will be handled, including banning people who are not abiding by the rules. As you can see, hosting an online community involves preparation and resources, but the benefits could outweigh the effort it will take to manage it. An online community provides a "captive" audience where your messaging is more likely to be seen and where you could receive more interactions and responses than on a typical social network page. |