How do user communities work? The concept of a community is that you are a part of something bigger than yourself and that by getting involved, your life will be better off. You believe your work has meaning or value, and you know that others can assist you because they are engaged in a similar endeavor.

Consider user communities as a resource for learning about consumer preferences and product usage. Furthering your relationships with them can also be done with the help of it. By encouraging interactions between customers, you can get valuable insights into their needs and desires, which will lead to better products in the future and a better experience in their customer journey. 

In this article, I’ll explain what user communities are, and why they’re significant, and offer suggestions for how you can start implementing them in your company to strengthen your relationships with customers.

What Exactly Is A User Community?

Much like it sounds, a user community assists other product users by utilizing the knowledge, assistance, and “wisdom of the crowd” of your community. Establishing a user community can significantly aid in helping you improve your service, offer support, and increase your adoption if your product is widely used and has a variety of useful features. Additionally, it is a good place to gather product feedback so you can identify any areas where the user experience can be improved to be more frictionless and self-service. In actuality, user communities offer an average return on investment of 4,530%. Additionally, it could be applied as an “escalation” technique to learn more about user-friction points.

Although user communities can take on many different shapes and formats, many of them serve the same purpose as conventional message boards where members can ask and answer questions. More general-purpose user communities are probably more familiar to you. For developers, Stack Overflow is a fantastic resource. There are numerous user communities for numerous products, projects, and industries on Slack. It’s more challenging to technically maintain and attract users to such a community, but it’s another good way to provide product support. You can do this by developing a user community just for your products on your website. A business that excels at this is Wix, for instance.

Why Are User Communities Crucial?

When interacting with your customers, the implementation of user communities can be a crucial differentiator. Users have the chance to provide feedback on your product and even work with you to improve it thanks to user communities.

One of the easiest and most efficient ways to develop a strong bond with your clients, both old and new, that doesn’t demand much from them. 

Giving your customer a voice, on the other hand, can feel intimate and powerful to the right customers. The best part is that it’s neither difficult nor expensive, and you might even already have some of the platforms necessary to start nurturing one. 

Communities are typically more social in nature, so in addition to having a specific forum for customer support, you can also rely on social media platforms that many of them already use in their personal lives, such as Linkedin, Instagram, Discord, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. The secret is to be involved!

User Community Benefits

Hosting an online user community has a variety of advantages:

• Crowdsourcing product support saves time and effort
• Relatively easy to set up and administer
• Invite users to become more engaged in the product
• Increase adoption through constant feeding of product updates and support
• Help frustrated users find solutions quickly
• Relatively low-cost solution
• Gather ideas about customer needs to improve and build your product

How To Create A Very Engaged User Community?

It takes time to build up an active support community for your products. Time and planning are required. You must continue to moderate them even after they become well-liked in order to ensure that questions are being addressed and the conversation is continuing. In order to avoid being one of the 22% of communities without a community strategy, try to set aside time to write one down. The following advice will help you create and maintain your own product support community. 

Let Users Know About The Community

If your customers are unaware of the community, they won’t participate in it. Make sure they are informed about the neighborhood and how it can help them. Use your websites, social media accounts, mailing lists, product updates, and other marketing strategies. Don’t, however, make your neighborhood into a billboard for your business.

Involve Users In Planning

Finding a number of seasoned users and asking them to assist in need identification is a surefire way to create a functional community. Making decisions about its structure and emphasis can be aided by this. Look for users who have been vocal on social media or try to find very engaged users who can become your champions in your product data to find these users. Users can be encouraged to participate by offering SWAG, product discounts, or even by building a community of champions.

Provide Value

Make sure the conversations and content in the community provide constant value to users – helping them derive more value for them from the product. Share blogs, release notes, feature updates, exclusive promotions, webinars, and more. To promote engagement, you can also plan activities and events that are exclusive to the community.

Leverage Community Knowledge

Users will begin responding to questions that other users pose on their own once your community gets going. Other users may benefit from these responses as well. What can you do to make it easier for users to find the most useful information?

Viewers can rate problem-solving approaches so that the best ones are displayed first in many popular communities and support forums. This includes rating comments, voting up the best solutions, displaying related articles, and more. Find a way to best connect people with the information they need within posts, to help users find answers quickly and efficiently.

Forget Extrinsic Incentives

User participation and engagement should be driven by their enjoyment. For instance, The Hunt users may want to spend time assisting others in finding fashionable clothing because they enjoy shopping. Many business owners believe that paying people, giving them a share of the profits, or offering financial incentives will help them develop communities more quickly and will persuade people to do whatever it is that they are asked to do—sell products, make purchases, produce content, or whatever else. We firmly believe that extrinsic motivations will backfire and that franchises based on intrinsic motivation are the most long-term sustainable franchises.

Foster A Democratic Playing Field

Except for the select few who win them, nobody enjoys popularity contests. Treating all users equally would be preferable to rewarding those who receive the most likes or engagement with their content. According to Weingarten, The Hunt users particularly value the knowledge that their hunts will be solved even if they’re not necessarily one of the cool kids because they tend to be average people with average incomes and budgets.

Event Communities

Create a community to support the event until you can hold in-person events once more. Even though Zoom meetings are fantastic, it can be challenging to carry on the conversation after the meeting has ended. It’s the same way with in-person events. Your event community can assist you in ensuring that attendees continue to benefit from the event even after it has ended. They can continue to communicate with the contacts they made at your event, exchange ideas with one another, and request notes for sessions they were unable to attend.

Moderate

Make sure your company is represented so that they can respond to inquiries, escalate problems, and collect suggestions for product improvement. Make sure to assign someone to this as a defined part of their job, not as a side project. Having an escalation process with the other departments, this person should be keeping a daily eye on the neighborhood. Additionally, by offering incentives, you can encourage user participation in community management. 5.7 employees work in the typical community.

Focus On Your Users

Avoid treating your user group like another marketing channel by which your company talks at your customers. Show that you are aware that the user group-company relationship is very much a two-way street and that the customers set the agenda. The best way to keep your user group active and thriving is to constantly give the users the impression that the group is made for them, not for the company. Naturally, the company stands to gain, but the users must believe that the company is being considerate in the questions and information it shares with the group.

Encourage Authentic And Positive Communication

While some online communities may gain popularity quickly as a result of sarcastic comments, according to Weingarten, a community centered on people interacting with strangers should prioritize positivity and authenticity. It’s the reason The Hunt explicitly advises users to “Say something nice” when commenting on other people’s hunts and explains on its community page that jerks aren’t allowed and any post that is disrespectful or unkind will be removed without warning.

Listen And Take Action

Tell your users you’re paying attention. Recognize the effort they are making to support one another, confirm product ideas, offer suggestions, and promote your solutions. Incorporate key users into your product management processes as beta testers, or look for quick wins where you can tangibly incorporate their work.

Conclusion

Possibilities for customers to share their stories and experiences about your product are made possible by enabling a user community, which is a great way to develop deeper relationships with your clients. This may lead to an increase in ROI, lifetime value, engagement, and referrals. It’s a win-win!