Online Community

Tips for Building a Strong Online Community

Building a community around your startup can be one of the cheapest ways to create momentum for your product. A community is much more than a one-time marketing campaign, and can help you throughout your company’s life cycle if you take the time to grow it right.

Here are tips for getting started.

1. Look Before You Leap

First, take stock of who is already talking about your product or industry and where they are doing it. A community consultant suggests you seek out “pockets of users who are excited about your product or service.” If users are already talking about your product on Twitter, for instance, that’s a good place to start building.

2. Get to Know Your Users

Kazi recommends you “use Twitter search to see who is posting about your company, competitor or about a topic that is relevant to your company. You can use that to follow people, start a conversation and engage with them.” This way you can start to build a relevant following from the ground up.

3. Build Social Into Your Product

If you want people to share, make it really easy on them. When they sign up, give them a checkbox to sign up for your newsletter. Ask them to follow you on Twitter and like you on Facebook as part of your onboarding process. Suggest opportunities for them to tweet or share with their friends. You’ll be amazed how many people will take the step to follow or share just because you took the time to ask.

4. Expect It to Take Time

Real community doesn’t happen overnight. Spinks advises “Every community will go through an ‘awkward phase’ where conversations feel a little forced and people aren't initiating conversations on their own. It will pass. Keep building your community one person at a time, and it will eventually begin to flow naturally.” The returns on your effort increase exponentially as you grow a real community. Don’t give up when your account doesn’t “go viral” immediately, because unless you’re the Old Spice guy, it’s probably not going to happen.

5. Connect and Help Your Community Members

Having Twitter followers or likes doesn’t mean you have a community. Spinks emphasizes this point: “It's good to engage your users personally, but that's not scalable. That's why it's so important to connect them with each other.”

By focusing on building a place where community members talk to each other, not just you, you’re on the way to building a scalable community that can sustain itself. Make sure your community finds value from their involvement — focus on building that value and your community will not only stick around, but become a huge supporter of your company.

6. Take Chances and Experiment

In some ways, a small community can be a blessing. It gives you the ability to try new things with very little fear of failure or of pissing a lot of people off. Handy suggests you “risk while the risk is low. If no one follows you, there is nowhere to go but up.” I firmly believe you should always be trying new things, but there’s no better time for your off-the-wall ideas than when you don’t have much to lose.

7. Have a Personality

Think about some of your favorite brands online. Are they boring and dry, or do they have a distinct personality or brand voice

10. Track Everything

A vibrant community helps you attract new users, keep current users engaged, and provide valuable feedback to help improve your product. At the beginning, getting any retweet or share will be a victory. If done right, however, you’ll find yourself quickly and exponentially growing past those initial milestones

Mkula Dennis