Building a Thriving Social Community: Key Features and Strategies for Success
The internet has created an amazing opportunity for businesses, brands, and individuals to create social communities. Social communities can be formed around shared ideas, hobbies, goals, or experiences. They are not much different from clubs and groups that meet in person. However, the digital world breaks down geographic barriers and allows people from anywhere in the world to connect over shared interests.
Building an online social community starts with identifying a common interest that can bind people together. After that, it is critical to identify the place for your social community to call home. Your new community needs a platform that offers all the features and tools needed for success. Finally, there are some well-tested strategies that can increase your chances of building and sustaining a thriving social community.
The Foundation of a Successful Social Community
As we discussed in our previous post, Getting Started with an Online Community Platform, it is important to do some research and planning before starting your social community. This starts with defining your purpose and identifying your core audience. Still, if you want your social community to thrive, there is one more step that will go a long way toward a successful effort: setting clear objectives.
What is it that you hope to accomplish? Objectives should be very specific to your vision for the online community and your purpose for starting it. If you are starting a group related to your business, it may be to increase engagement and possibly lead to increased sales. If you are designing a social community related to your hobby, it may be to find like-minded people to learn and grow with. There are as many objectives for social communities as there are communities. What is important is that you know your objective for your group.
Key Features Every Social Community Needs
In our previous post, Choosing The Best Platform To Build Online Community, we covered critical features to look for when choosing a platform on which to build. Here, let’s look at features from a user perspective. If you want people to join and engage with your social community, what are some features that potential users will want to see?
Robust Privacy and Security Features – People are more concerned with privacy than ever. Not only that, they are bombarded daily with stories of data breaches and companies that did not take steps to protect their users. That’s what makes SpeakBits a great place to start your community. SpeakBits takes privacy and security seriously, using the latest industry-standard measures to ensure the protection of user data and to provide users the ability to control what they share.
Advanced Engagement Tools – Today’s users want a variety of ways to post, interact, and engage. Posting and commenting are great, but consider using a platform that allows for additional ways to engage. SpeakBits offers enhanced engagement tools like an upvote/downvote system, direct messaging, and customizable user profiles to help you connect with and grow your social community.
User-Friendly Interface – Nothing turns away community members faster than a platform that is confusing and hard to navigate. SpeakBits was designed from the ground up to emphasize simplicity and user-centered design. Your community members can focus on sharing and engaging, not on learning their way around a platform.
Strategies to Build and Grow a Thriving Social Community
Now, we get to the real meat of how to build and grow a thriving social community. These strategies fall into three categories: nurturing engagement, effective moderation, and personalizing the user experience.
Nurturing Engagement – If you look at an established social community, it may seem that it runs itself. In fact, long-running communities tend to gain a lot of momentum. That means, at some point, it may take less effort to get people involved and keep them engaged. However, when getting started, a lot falls on the leader of the community.
Here are some strategies for building and nurturing engagement in your community:
Content Creation: In a mature community, you can likely count on your members to contribute content. However, to get started, much of that may fall to you. Before even starting the community, it will be helpful to consider and collect content so that you can post and share on a regular basis. Find content that will be valuable to your desired audience and will keep them coming back for more.
Promoting Discussions: It can take some time to get members to move from just reading and digesting content to engaging with it. There are things you can do to encourage people to join in group discussions. You can facilitate discussion by asking relevant and thought-provoking questions, directly encouraging members to join in, and responding to comments quickly and in ways that will lead to further discussion.
Effective Moderation – Robust online social communities require clear and consistent moderation to grow and thrive. It only takes one or two users to ruin a community for everyone. But there are ways to get ahead of this and maintain a healthy group.
Here are some tips for effectively moderating your new social community.
Establishing Community Guidelines: From the very beginning, be sure you have posted clear policies that establish the ground rules for a positive and respectful environment.
Establish the Moderator Role: Whether it is just you or you recruit other members, have a clear process of quickly enforcing rules in a way that keeps things on track without stifling discussion.
Personalizing the Member Experience – Before the internet provided tools for gathering online, in-person social groups had ways to personalize the gathering experience. Whether it was name tags, icebreakers, or social time, there were intentional ways for people to get to know each other as people.
Fortunately, platforms like SpeakBits offer ways to bring this level of personalization to the online experience.
Here are some strategies to personalize the member experience in your social community:
User Profiles: Encouraging members of your groups to personalize their profiles allows members to get to know each other.
New Member Introductions: You may consider asking new members to create posts introducing themselves. It helps to give them some guidelines as to what information they might share. To take it a step further, encourage the other members of the community to respond. This will help build community and make the experience more personal for everyone.