Surely building an online community is simple? If your brand is strong enough, and you have a discussion forum or an open digital space for communication – won’t it just happen automatically? Well, yes, it could happen automatically, but would it necessarily lead to the best online community you could have? It’s one thing to create an online community, but when you nurture one, that’s when you’ll see long lasting engagement, increased brand trust and a thriving community that can even cut down support costs.
Here are our three tips on how to build an online community and nurture it with Telligent Community.
Nurture your community with the experts you employ
If you’re an enterprise business considering creating and building a digital community, then there’s no doubt that your organization is of a certain level, with talented employees that are unrivalled experts in their fields. Your people are your best asset here, use your employees to bring an element of quality into your online community.
For example, if you have a discussion forum based on sports equipment, and your business sells sports equipment, then why not have a few of your expert staff: sports shoe buyers, sports scientists and niche experts be active in the forum and add their two cents to the equation? This will add instant trust to your community, already putting it a cut above a lot of competition.
Use Telligent Community’s discussion forums to give your experts a voice.
Breathe life into your blogs, open up the barriers
Blogs are a fantastic accompaniment to any online community, as they help to add backup resource and an official, authoritative word to what can seem like an endless current of posts, comments and opinions. By letting your experts officially voice their niche outlook on the industry, you’ll be seen as a trusted source of knowledge. Better yet, however, there is more you can do with your expert-led blog articles to further your community the right way.
Try utilizing Telligent Community’s comments, ratings and likes features to add on extra interactive functionality to your blog posts. More encouraged engagement like this means more trust, and trust helps you to build an online community through growth.
Take care with branding, and the trust will grow over time
Humans are an incredibly visual species, and we often take comfort in familiarity from visual cues. Our car outside our home, that favourite sweater or favourite place to unwind and relax. The same effect happens with brand trust too, with logos and slogans reassuring us that our favourite golf club, car or airline is the brand that it is.
When you build an online community, don’t just simply launch a forum or intranet system, let everyone know that this is your forum, your discussion area and you’ll be there to offer advice and debunk myths if required. You’ll be there to moderate away any spam and unwanted content. It’s you that users can trust.
Telligent Community’s rich blogging platform allows you to fully customise blogs you post with your own stunning visuals. Our forum features also allow customization through apps and can integrate with your existing systems.
Speak to one of our experts today for more information on how to build an online community and nurture it with Telligent.