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Running a business today requires a lot of connections. And, with the aftereffects of the pandemic still being felt, online communities are thriving. It comes as a natural conclusion that, as a business, you want to have a solid online community. Connections in our lives take us everywhere, and they make things easier. With that in mind, let’s see how building an online community for your business may help expand your company and solidify your place on the market.
What is an online business community?
An online business community is a group of people with similar interests that communicate together via a platform. From a business perspective, it can include both employees and customers.
The most significant benefits of building an online community for your business are:
- it helps make genuine connections with employees and customers;
- an online community is a perfect place to find new leads;
- improve customer experience by allowing your clients to connect with the company staff;
- open your business to the potential crowdsourcing support;
- improve your products by getting genuine feedback from your customers;
- share valuable information with your clients for free.
All of these benefits make your business stronger.
It all starts with a plan
An online community needs to have a purpose, one topic of conversation that groups the people together. That common interest should be your business goal. With that in mind, you need to start with assessing your business priorities and setting up a clear goal.
January is the perfect period for planning since the entire year is ahead. Sit down with your teams and decide what the purpose of this online community should be. You need something that will bring people together.
Assess the needs of your employees
What is the purpose of your employees within this community? Will they be in charge of providing information to the customers? Or is this a place for them to learn more about the business? Maybe you want to use the community to search for new employees.
An online community allows you to find employees internationally. Many people are quitting their jobs and trying to find work abroad. An online business community makes this possible because of remote work. You can speak with people from all around the world and find the ones that are the best fit for the job.
As well as of your customers
If you were a customer, what would you want out of an online community? This should be your starting point when defining the community goals. Your customers have needs, and you need to know what they are.
Social media platforms are excellent for building online communities since they already have a solid base of engaged users. By assessing their needs, it will be possible to better connect with your clients and give them exactly what they want.
Building an online community for your business does not happen overnight
Once you know the needs of your business, employees, and customers, you can slowly start to implement your ideas. This is not a process that you can rush.
The best approach is to start building the community internally. Have all the employees on the network and make a base for the community. This is the stage that will allow you to figure out how communication works and what are some issues or pain points. You can fix everything and make it better before you open the community to the customers.
Find the platform you want to use
This all starts with picking the platform. Some examples would be Teams, Slack, Skype, Zoom, and so on. You can also use social media platforms if you want a more relaxed environment. Just have in mind that not all platforms are business-oriented. Some have better features than others.
Depending on the goals and requirements you set, you can compare various platforms and see which one fits your community profile. If your goal is to create business partnerships, it is better to focus on platforms that support this.
Set KPIs to track progress
When you kickstart your community, you need to track and measure the success. All of the goals need to be met at one point. What you want to do is to make sure that the community is serving its purpose.
The starting period is where you see what works, what needs to be fixed, and how you want to organize and run your community. Be ready for changes.
Community administrators
Creating an online community and running it successfully are two different things. You cannot do it alone. You need to give roles and assign community administrators. They will do everything from managing access, reviewing requests, and just tracking overall what happens on a daily basis.
If your community is more like an online forum, you need administrators to manage various sections. This all depends on the size and the complexity of the community.
It can be tough to know exactly what you need to do here, and it’s for that reason that media training services can be helpful. This will be a tailor made approach depending on the individual needs of your business, helping you take your online community and social media pages to the next level.
Learn from experience
If this is your first time, do a little research before starting anything. Try joining some communities to get the feel of it. Ask people who already run similar communities to get some feedback about their problems. This is a crucial part of the process.
While you will set your own rules and work on building the community within the company, you definitely want to hear about other peoples’ experiences. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel, so follow in the footsteps of those that did it before you.
Patience and dedication are the keys to success
Once you have finished building an online community for your business, you will need to show a lot of dedication. A community is a living, breathing organism that requires constant attention. You will need a lot of patience, so have that in mind. Best of luck with creating a community that will help you build more connections and strengthen your business!
