- [Presenter] Online communities are a powerful tool
for your business.
As you look at creating a community,
it's really critical to understand the overall benefits
and which ones are the most important for your business.
Some of the benefits of developing an online community
include the ability to gather feedback and ideas.
These are ideas from your customers
who know your brand really well.
And you can create real conversations
where you can solicit this really critical feedback.
You're able to provide support and customer service.
People now have an expectation that they can go online
and if they're having an issue with a brand,
they can post it on their Twitter or their Facebook,
and then they expect a response.
An online community helps you provide the support
and customer service when your customers need it.
Another benefit is the increasing of brand
and product awareness.
As you build that community you have members
that are not only contributing content,
but they're also learning more about your brand.
And so this evolution will increase brand
and product awareness.
You're able to better understand your customers
and their needs because you can simply ask them.
It's a really, really powerful way
to get into the mindset of your target customer.
Another benefit is the ability to build relationships
between you and your audience.
This means you have the potential
of turning a prospective customer into a loyal fan.
Online communities will support you
in increasing customer interactions, conversions and sales.
And one of the most important reasons
is you're able to provide value
beyond your products or services.
This simply means that you're not always selling.
You don't always need to sell to your audience,
instead perhaps you're able to leverage your expertise
just to make the lives of your members better.
And I think that this is a really critical part
of building a powerful community.
An example of customer service and action
and the importance of building online community
is the fact that customer complaints on social media
have increased by eight times since 2014.
We know that an unhappy customer
has a potential to amplify online.
What's great though on the other hand
is that the same goes for happy customers.
Community management helps you create more happy customers
and address any unhappy ones.
There are four main reasons
you may want to build your own online community.
The first is engagement.
Every comment made online about your brand
leaves a digital footprint.
These breadcrumbs lead to people learning more
about your brand.
So the more positive comments online,
the better it is for your brand.
That's why it's important to foster these conversations
and to keep them alive.
Also many social media algorithms like Facebook
use measurements like comments and engagement
to choose whether they show these in the newsfeed.
So this is a really important component
of building your community as well.
Next is monitoring, this is considered social listening.
A huge part of community management is social listening.
It's a monitoring of the whole internet, Facebook, Twitter
Pinterest, blog posts everywhere.
It's listening for those conversations about your brand.
Next is moderation,
and this is the ability to protect your reputation online.
This involves making sure
that anything said about your brand
that you have heard through social listening is addressed.
It gives you the ability to see what brand sentiment is
towards your company.
And it gives you the opportunity
to ensure that any negative feedback
is addressed immediately.
Next we have measuring.
This is your ability to gather feedback.
Feedback as we know is so important for your brand.
You can get really pure unsolicited advice
that leads to the betterment of products and services.
You're able to measure your brand sentiment
basically how people feel about your brand.
And that allows you to get some really important information
to grow and maintain the health of your company.
Building your online community might be as easy
as beginning to listen to these conversations
your fans are having about you online,
or you might be looking at hiring a community manager
to manage all your social channels
and your online community.
Wherever you are, now's a really great time
to begin thinking about your brand's why.
Why might you build and grow your own online community?