People value a community most when they connect, engage and feel encouraged to share their opinions and perspectives. Communities that thrive on user-contributed content are proven to be most successful, where the community members can share their own experiences and ideas online – making that online community strong and successful.
Grow Your Online Community
To grow your online community, here are some tips that might help you start building or scaling your already existing online community.
1. Chose Social Media Platform
Right from the start, choosing a social media platform plays an important role for your community as the growth of your community depends on the usability, features and interface of the social media application. At its core, an online community is essentially a gathering of like-minded people who would like to discuss and share ideas.
2. Create A Community Culture
Adopting a community culture helps build a feeling of belongingness and staying connected for community members. The best way to grow your community is to establish a “For the members, To the members, By the members” culture for your online community. This will increase involvement within the community.
3. Personalise Support
Every problem is unique, so personalization of the support experience should continue to reinforce the community feeling. Try to be authentic and reply genuinely. The team admins or the champions of the online community should engage with the community with their characteristics and personalities. Don’t be a brand entity to your community members, rather support them as individuals.
4. Connect With Members
Don’t make your community a dead class with no interaction and discussions. Involve the community in fun nights, gaming sessions, music jam nights. Try and plan your content in ways it will add value to the network of people in your community.
5. Reward Members
Rewarding members of the community will help you stay connected with members. Try to have giveaways and incentives for your community members, this will help you retain potential members in the long run.
6. Measure Your KPI’s
Identify, measure and analyze community engagement based on KPIs. You can measure the number of posts in a day, reviews by the community, or responses to a question in your community.
You can measure based on the number of community members, comments, likes, shares, replays etc based on the platform you use. Such statistics indicate how people are engaging with your content and community, are they interacting amongst each other and help you track the overall success at any point in time.
7. Identify Moderators and Potential Users
You can’t run/manage a community alone. Try to be a leader and identify potential moderators for your online community, who will moderate, engage the community with you. Moderators will be a key role in building stronger bonds within your online community.
Identify potential users and collect reviews, feedbacks and suggestions on a weekly/monthly basis. This will help you create a better community experience.
8. Collaborate
After building your community and working on different goals to grow your community, it’s time to collaborate! Find other communities, influential persons in your niche with similar follower demographics and find a way to grow together. This could mean hosting a live discussion together or offering a giveaway that promotes each other. Anything you can do to introduce your online community to new audiences who can potentially become community members.
9. Promote Community Discussions
Create intriguing and informative content that inspires your online community. Having lots of discussions with community members will go along the way, this can foster community growth and bonding.
Creating an online community takes time, commitment and consistent efforts. Be an active observer, note the trends within the community, the highs and lows. Work on creating better experiences for members. It will result in active participation within the community and it will flourish on its own.
If you are wondering where to get started – Leher has all the features you need! Not only can you grow your online community by starting your club, but you and your club members can now earn as you have meaningful conversations.
