1. Planning
Plant the right seeds
Communities that lack a clear goal or mission are set up to fail from the start. To avoid this, we recommend using our WHY, WHO, WHAT, HOW method to clearly define your community mission.
Community is more critical for companies than ever before. The Social+ Community Corner is anyone's go-to place to discover how to build a thriving digital community.
The Social+ Community Building Framework is a comprehensive and constantly evolving guide for building and maintaining an online community. It covers all aspects, ranging from initial planning to successful launch, ongoing operations, and effective monetization strategies. The framework highlights the importance of understanding your community's goals and purpose while ensuring value is delivered to both users and the business.
Communities that lack a clear goal or mission are set up to fail from the start. To avoid this, we recommend using our WHY, WHO, WHAT, HOW method to clearly define your community mission.
Not only do you need the right seeds, but you also need to nurture your community with the right team to ensure a strong start to its growth process. Make sure you understand the stakeholders you need and get them prepared.
You only get one chance to make a first impression. Planning a successful launch with a seamless user experience is vital for community success. In this section, you'll find metrics and strategies to create awareness, attract members, and drive activation within your community.
After the initial onboarding of users, it may seem challenging to encourage engagement among community members. But it doesn’t have to be. By diversifying your engagement strategies, you can improve your chances of success.
To build a self-sustaining and lasting community, you need to recruit, recognize, and give responsibilities to your power users.
Learn how to effectively track the success of your community and its impact on your business. Discover strategies to monetize specific aspects of your community for direct revenue generation.
To build a successful community, it's essential to have the right stakeholders and an effective internal team. Community operations involve various roles, including moderators, content creators, influencers, and experts, all working together to drive engagement and create a thriving community environment.
With smaller communities, it’s possible for individuals to fulfill multiple roles, such as creating content, engaging with the community, and moderating it all by themselves. However, as your business grows and more stakeholders become involved in the community, it becomes increasingly essential to have a central owner of the community internally.
Community ownership not only entails managing and overseeing the community, but more importantly, ensures value generation by connecting the activity of the community to areas in the business for actionable insights. This will make sure that your WHY is always a part of the picture as your community develops.
In many cases, two separate stakeholders are in charge of community management and ownership.
Use the Social+ Community Roles to better understand all the possible roles in a community team so you equip yourself with the best and necessary stakeholders from the start of your community building journey.
The moderation of your community might be carried out by your community teams, support teams, or other key stakeholders in the community. Use the Social+ Mini Guide on How to Establish Community Moderation to have a clear plan of action for moderation.
Content creation can be carried out by community managers or the marketing/content team of your business, collaborating with the community management team to deliver relevant content to your user base.
Including experts or influencers in your community is essential. By involving them in content creation and interacting with community members, you enhance the overall value of your community for all members. Whether it's sports pundits in a football app, doctors in a healthcare app, tutors in an educational app or beauticians in a make-up app, experts can elevate the community experience, regardless of the field.
Community is a cross-department, cross-domain initiative that requires active participation by different stakeholders. Having an overall clear community owner is pivotal to making sure your community efforts are organized and effectively tracked.
You only get one chance to make a first impression. Planning a successful launch with a seamless user experience is vital for community success. In this section, you'll find metrics and strategies to create awareness, attract members, and drive activation within your community.
