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Why Grow an Online Community

By Robert Lear posted 09-24-2020 11:21 PM

  

Why Grow an Online Community?

Whether you’re an influencer, a business, or a marketer, you understand that creating an online community can be hard work. It takes effort to gather many people around one thing – even if it’s something they all have in common or like.

And the work doesn’t stop there. Communities need to be managed, monitored, and occasionally even policed because the online world isn’t safe, and there are fraudsters and bad actors everywhere.

But still, month after month, year after year, communities are being invested in. Whether it’s organic effort or the kind that involves a checkout procedure, there’s no end to building communities. The question that rises only natural is – why? Why would you spend your resources into building a community around your social networks, for example? There are a couple of reasons.

Every New Fan or Customer Gets the Benefits

Unless you’re growing a toxic community, a person who buys your product or subscribes to your service or social media profile will get instant access into a wealth of resources offered by the community.

The community will be there to help them out, show them the ropes, provide support, and do a lot of the onboarding and loyalty work for you. And a good community will do that without any input from you.

Communities Are Effective for Marketing

A community is a place capable of starting word-of-mouth, the most valuable sort of marketing that’s also the hardest to get started. But that’s only one of the ways a community can serve your marketing efforts.

Brand ambassadors are people who will spread the word about your brand without any direct deal with you. They are the people who are in it for sheer loyalty. They will proselytize your brand or profile wherever they can, bringing you new audiences completely free of charge.

Communities Help You Test Things

If you want to launch a new product or service, or if you’re interested in producing a new kind of content for your social media channels, you’ll need to create a focus group that will tell you whether or not to do it. Or, if you have a community, you can take it to them.

Sure, you can still select and choose only some of the members of the community for the “focus group,” but the point still is the same. You’ll have the people who will tell you whether your ideas sound good and give you some insight that will help you hone your offering.

Communities Help Retain Followers

You don’t want the community to completely have a life of its own. But you also don’t want them waiting for your hints to take certain actions. Communities will have lives of their own, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing, except enjoy the benefits from it.

When new members become a part of a community, they’ll need some time to get their bearings and see who’s who. But once they do that, they’ll naturally join the life of the community, an the livelier the community, the more likely it is they’ll stay engaged with it.

Communities, on their own, are engagement machines you have little power over but can still do you a world of good. That’s why it makes perfect sense to invest in building them and doing whatever you can to grow and strengthen them.

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