How a Social Community Can Improve Your Business
Community represents a group of people communicating various topics of mutual interest. Groups and connections can exist on any channel but a community is channel agnostic, and social media, on the other hand, is very channel specific. Understanding the difference between a community and a social medium is crucial before you choose the right tool for your business. To start your own blog for your business means that you will invest in retention and conversion rates. Personalized communities provide stable and deep relationships with your target audience, which is a goal attained harder with other marketing tactics.
Why do you need your own community?
Online interaction is the key to success of your business. Due to massive technological improvements and evolution of people’s communication, the old-fashioned marketing tactics don’t have the effect they once did. Nowadays, you have to be present online in order to communicate better with your target audience. Regardless of the industry, your business belongs to, online presence is a must. It often comes back to the question “Where do we communicate with our target audience?” The answer, of course, is in the online world. Sometimes that can be social media. It is a completely valid channel for interacting with your customers, however, community extends far beyond social media.
Pros and cons of building a community on a company node
Before you decide to build a community, you need to audit your online presence. An audit is important because it will give you a clear direction of whether or not you should build a community for your business. For instance, if you have a platform that your target audience logs into, with a lot of impressions already, then you should definitely consider building your own community.
However, if you don’t offer a digital product on your website, it will be extremely difficult to get people to come to your site. There are many companies which have a well-known presence, but is inexistent online. For example, Uber is an extremely successful company but their attempt to build an online community has failed miserably. We constantly use Uber but we never go to Uber’s website – the destination doesn’t make sense.
It’s very important to have relationships with your community members, however, having this on other social network platforms can be tricky. A lot of those platforms like Twitter and Facebook, won’t allow you to take names and email addresses.
The future of community
What we like the most about communities is the human element. When you join a community, you know that your needs will be taken care of by a human being, not by some automated chatbot. Fortunately, all these features will remain the same in the future because of its essential value. However, bots and automated community managers will appear, which is a fascinating concept. The future will be very smart, and new tools will help community managers scale their work. For instance, a type of bot will exist that will match new users to another user who is interesting to them. The bot will simply ping new or existing users, notifying about another member with a similar interest. New AI software tools will only improve the whole community experience for both members and community managers. The efficiency they will provide will give extra time for other valuable activities.
Nowadays, many online builders offer easy and convenient community building solutions. For instance, a platform like Ning network offers simple community builders that everyone can use. You don’t have to be a developer or have a working knowledge of HTML and CSS. Builders can provide drag-and-drop solutions which are convenient for any entrepreneur or business owner out there.
Final thoughts
Communities provide benefits that you cannot get by having a social media presence. If you want to get really intimate with your customers and target audience and establish a quality relationship, a personal community is definitely for you. With a personal community, you will boost the performance of all the important metrics like retention and conversion rates, and most importantly, you will know exactly what the needs of your target audience are and how you can satisfy them.
We hope you found the promoted post as entertaining and informative as we did!
