An online community can be hugely beneficial to your business. It may boost sales, increase customer satisfaction, and give you more customer insight. However, managing a community takes a lot of resources. What kind of benefits might you see from your own online community? How can you tell whether it’s worth your time and energy to start your own?
What an Online Community Looks Like
Your community probably already exists — you have loyal customers, new customers, and potential customers already talking about you and your product. Your job in creating an online community for your SMB is to bring all those folks together, get them communicating with you and each other, and give them value. This could be in the form of an active blog, a message board, a wiki, even a Facebook page or group.
The format you choose will depend on what business you’re in as well as where you customers like to spend their time online. For example, if you have a handmade children’s toy business, your customers probably spend far more time on Instagram than they do updating technical wikis. Your business will determine the shape of your community, while your customers will determine its direction.
Invest in Your Customers
If you give your customers an empty message board, they aren’t going to use it. They want to know their time and opinions are valued. When you listen to your community, they know you care what they have to say. Have you ever had a great idea for an app feature that you submitted to the developer? What did you hear back? How quick was the response? Your customers have great ideas they’d like to share, too.
An active online community provides you with invaluable insights, far beyond suggestions and complaints. You can see how your customers are using your products and gauge the impact upon their lives. You can talk directly with them, often in real time.
Valuable Content
In addition to investing your time in your customers, another way to give them value is with high quality content. Community-building content is about your customers’ interests and needs, not about promotion of your business. Social media posts, blog posts, help articles, and even emails replies should be useful and interesting. This doesn’t merely apply to content you’ve created, but content you share from other sources as well. In fact, sharing great content from other sources with your customers is excellent for community building. Their time is as valuable as yours. Make sure the time they spend with your brand is not wasted.
Social Media
If you’re considering creating an online community, you’re probably already thinking about whether Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or others are the right fit. You may have already tried using social media to build your online community and found out it’s not quite as easy as it sounds.
If you’re going to use social media, keep a few important tips in mind. Use the network that makes the most sense for your business. Consider using a CRM with social media integration to help you determine where your customers are most active. Interact with groups and individuals who have interests that match your business and with complementary businesses. Remember the “social” in social media; it’s not a place solely for self-promotion.
Business Friendships
It’s just as important to engage with other businesses in your community as it is to engage customers. An active online community enables you to partner with other businesses to build connections. Likewise, being active in other online communities with related interests lets you meet and engage with other business owners. For SMBs this is an exceptionally powerful tool. Perhaps you feature a fellow business’ products in your storefront, hire a freelance designer you met in a group, or find a trustworthy tax preparer by recommendation. These kinds of connections and partnerships can highly benefit all of you.
Online communities can do wonders for your business, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that creating one is the right move for your business. Running a community with a respectable response time and dedication to quality content requires a significant time investment. For some small businesses, your time is better spent on other aspects of your business. Likewise, hiring someone to manage a community can be expensive for an SMB. Before you jump into starting an online community, carefully consider whether it’s really the right move for your business.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
