Is Your Community Ready For 2016?

People come for help/support content, and stay for engaging experiences in the community. Your community needs to offer something of high value, which exceeds your customers’ expectations and outshines your competitors. The site refresh cycles should provide unique feature to members. One way to maintain the engagement is capitalizing on the latest marketing tactics, other ones are-retargeted calls-to-action that remind community members of different community features they may not have explored yet.

There are a plenty of features your Online Community might be missing. To get your Community ready for the times to come, have a look at the latest community trends listed below:

Private Social Networking

Why? Not all communication that takes place in online communities is public. Enable customers to build and strengthen personal relationships. Offer secure spaces for customer intimacy programs, product innovation summits, and peer-peer idea exchanges.

How? Customers can build their personal brands and view how other members are participating. Generate ideas and information that fuel business innovation and customer satisfaction. Members can connect with each other, participate in forums, create blogs, private message, share photos and video, join groups, and more.

Crowd-sourced Ideas and Wikis

Why? To flesh out new feature ideas, increase engagement and brand loyalty and drive product innovation.

How? Wikis provide workgroups with access to project information and documents. Co-design new product and services requirements with your user group, advisory groups, and specific customer segments. Use of moderation tools can limit the number of votes permitted per member, set a cap on the number of ideas, or limit the timeframe for submitting.

Built-in Search Engine

Why? Keep your members engaged by offering a wide variety and quantity of information resources they seek.

How? Full text search can help search your knowledgebase more easily. Although the information ever shared in the online community is easily accessible.

Responsive User Interface

Why? Customers are not always at their desk. They will communicate the time they find most convenient through the device they are comfortable with.

How? Go mobile! Build community apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry. Integrate all major communication methods like managing event registration, conference-related communication, and session submissions in a single system. Also, you can help your members bypass the login screen by integrating “Single Sign-On”.

Rich Member Profiles

Why? Online communities are all about sharing. Give each customer the opportunity to showcase what they find interesting from social media sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and others.

How? Your site should include links to your social profiles on sites such a Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. Post links back into the community, from blogs, content sites, and other networks.

Badges

Why? 70% of online communities fail due to lack of contribution. Fostering greater engagement can be supported by encouraging visitors to participate.

How? Motivate them by rewarding their progress by awarding points or other units of social currency. Take advantage of native gaming mechanics to provide short-term rewards to first time social community user.

Groups & Chats

Why? To discuss topics that are more specific to their own interest and also for deeper, more focused and personalized conversations.

How? Branch off members and create their own individual discussion groups and email lists. Groups can be marked as public, private, or hidden. They act as a Resource directory. Groups can be used for qualitative data collection. You can directly put questions to the panelists or you can initiate a brainstorm on a product idea. Also, integrating group chat allows your customers to shape the conversations and choose how they would like the conversations to flow.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Want to implement the latest features in your Community now?

You allow your customers
to shape the conversations and choose how
they would like the conversations to flow.