Being a brand, business, or service seller is tough. You need to market your product/service. Keep running ads to increase your target audience. Brands, businesses, and service sellers need to create a strong social media presence if they want to reach out to their audience. This means Create An Online Support Community around your brand. An engaged community will help you get the word out about your products and services. Your customers will feel connected to your brand and trust you more. So, whether you’re a small business owner or a large corporation, building a community is essential.
Community managers play an essential role in any brand today. They are the ones responsible for building communities around brands. But what does it mean when you talk about communities? Communities are groups of people who share similar interests, ideas, opinions, and passions. They are made up of individuals who interact with each other regularly through online platforms like social media. A community manager is someone who helps create and maintain these communities. Their job is to ensure that every member feels welcome and included. They also help brands communicate with their audience. They are the bridge between the brand and its customers.
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Create An Online Support Community
In this article, we’ll go through how building a community is better than creating a forum for your brand, business, and services.
Why build a community when you can create a discussion forum?
Most brands, businesses, and service providers usually get stuck around this topic. They think about saving money and use the lame trick where they create a forum for their consumers to register product and service-related queries. Well, we do not blame you. There’s a lesser notion of community branding around in the market.
We recommend you get a better idea of the picture behind community branding. It’s better if your products get the deserving reach. So, to achieve this, create a community instead of creating a support forum. It will not only promote your business using content and marketing plugins but also provide the forum function to improve your brand value and reach in the market. We’ll talk about this in detail but first, let us understand what a community that is built around a brand, business, or service is.
What is a brand, business, or service community?
A brand, business, or service community is a group of people who are united around a shared passion for a product, service, or company. A community is a collection of individuals sharing similar interests and experiences. Brand communities are usually found online, but there are also offline groups of people who have a common interest in your brand. Brand communities are often very active online, with many people posting about your brand on different platforms. These posts can help you reach out to potential customers, keep existing customers informed, and inspire other people to join your community.
If you create an online presence, then you should consider creating a Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, Instagram account, Pinterest board, Google Plus Page, LinkedIn profile, Tumblr blog, or any other platform that might appeal to your target audience. You should try to connect with current and prospective customers by sending them emails, offering discounts, or asking them questions.
Online Support Community Vs Discussion Forum
Online discussion forums are one general way of promoting discussions on your brand, business, or service. They are effective and we won’t deny it. But, a major problem that begins is that you only benefit from forum discussions. People don’t stay at the forum for long. Once, they start losing interest in the discussion it’s over. On the other hand, an online community platform will bring a personal touch to your potential customers. It has many wonderful supportive plugins that encourage and engage your customers over and over again. Here I have mentioned the list of features that a community offers but a discussion forum doesn’t.
- Detailed Profile Creation – The detailed profile creation plugin for the community allows your customers to create an account, and use their profile picture. Update stuff like location, education, gender, age, and interests. Furthermore, you can use plugins like profile completion progress bar, it will let you decide if the customer is eligible for posting stuff on the activity stream and things such as that.
- Activity Streams – You can allow your customers to post any type of content that goes relevant to your products or services. They can even share the news of buying a new product from your local store/online store, overall promoting your business.
- Blogging – Your customers can blog and share them on their activity streams! The blogs can be anywhere related to your business or your product and service. People who love to write will also join your community and then they’ll promote your product for free, just to promote their skills/sharpen their skills.
- Gamification – You can award trophies and points to customers for buying products, using activity steam actively, and participating in events. You can also offer giveaways to customers during an achievement period. Gamification increases community engagement, we say it, and we believe it. Look for the “why” part here.
- Community Moderation – With the full BuddyX add-on plugin community bundle from Wbcom Designs, you can easily moderate your community. You can even do things such as organizing polls and setting up profanity.
These are some features that come along with community creation. A regular business usually looks for a long-term marketing strategy that allows them to establish a mini-market of their own. A community does the same for you. It’s never-ending and completely depends on what use you make of it.
How to create an online support community for your business, brand, and service?
Creating a community is easy. Down below are the very steps required to start and set up a community for your business, brand, or service!
1. Create your own website
To begin, you should first start by creating an initial WordPress website. Create your site and give it a unique name. The name should entice visitors to check out your new website. After creating it, choose BuddyPress – the WordPress gold standard plugin for making community websites.
2. Select an idea
Once you’ve set your site You can begin seeking out a suitable template for your brand community website. Choose a theme that’s compatible with all the necessary plugins required to manage a website for the community. You can pick among our top themes which is the BuddyX theme.
3. Keep your website up to current
Once you have activated the BuddyX theme or another theme, open the theme set-up and load a sample to help. The BuddyX theme works well and is helpful and was designed with the large community websites in the back of our minds.
The features listed below are part of BuddyX, our BuddyX theme.
- Members’ Profiles
- Discussions in poetry Plugin
- Posting Forums
- Memberships/Subscriptions
- Commenting, posting, and posting on blogs
Also Read: PeepSo bbPress Addon
Wrapping Up
Allow your brand to become a part of many successful brand communities existing in the community market. Get your own brand, business, or service community today and avail hundreds of
Intersting Read:
Top Business Benefits Of Having An Online Forum Community
15 Best Free Forum Plugins to Create WordPress Community Website
