Online communities are on the rise!
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And rightly so, to battle the fatigue of working from home, missing out on networking opportunities that happen from offline events otherwise and a place to learn together with folks who share your passion or interests.
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Creator communities, learning communities and Brand communities are hot right now! The community has turned out to be the primary source to gather real-time feedback on products/content, to learn about upcoming trends in the industry and to gain loyal followers/users. Communicating with the users/followers through community helps build a stronger relationship than what social media could achieve.
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Where there's demand, multiple solutions will come up. We've seen a rise of community platforms - chat based as well as forum based ones. How do you know which one to go ahead with for your community?
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How do you pick a community platform? Here's how 👇
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Define the Community Personas
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Here are 3 steps to help you define your community persona:
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Identifying your community personas will help you streamline the content, engagement and networking events for your members, basis which you can pick a platform that facilitates all/most of your checklists.
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Solving Community Pain Points
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"The strongest communities are built around a pain or struggle that people feel shame around. Identify a pain that people are experiencing, and create a space where they're accepted because of that pain. Give them a place where they don't have to feel shame." - David Spinks
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Pick a platform that simplifies/automates tasks that lead to ultimately addressing your community member's pain points. Ex: If it's a community around Product Management and one of the major pain point of the members is access to PM leaders - pick a platform that helps facilitate easy video calls, networking sessions, AMAs, etc with these folks and also lets you archive these conversations in their content repository or integrates with a content management tool.
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Understanding community motivations and goals
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Why is it important to have a good understanding of your member's aspirations and goals?
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Define the engagement rituals and content to be hared, basis this. It'll help you narrow down the tools/features you would want to see in your community platform.
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List down all tools you would need
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Once you have the wishlist of features/integrations with you, pick one of these top platforms that support your community the most 👇
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Here's a video by Velocitize on how to use Slack for your online community:
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Here are some tips to create an engaging community on Discord
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Discord has gained popularity for it's voice channels! Here's a tutorial on how you can use voice channels for your community:
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Here are the features each offer, to help you pick between these two:
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There are few other chat based apps being used for communities. Check them out here.
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