Why owning a Community Website is the future of social engagement?

The key to any successful endeavour is its audience! No matter how well laid out your plan is, it is nothing if your audience isn’t well engaged.

So, how do you keep your audience engaged at all times? How do you ensure that they can interact with you and your work in a meaningful manner regularly?

By building an online community website, of course!

An online community website is a fool-proof way of enticing your users to interact with you actively.

In this article, we will expand on what an online community is and why it matters to your business.

So, without wasting further time, let’s start!

What’s an Online Community Website?

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So, let’s start with a little analogy. Imagine Facebook. With all its social features, plugins, and capabilities, it is the perfect way for people to interact with each other but also to swiftly climb the ladder of commercial success. Now, imagine something like Facebook - but built especially for your project. A platform where your customers can interact with each other, share ideas, opinions, and thoughts - all focused on a common interest that brings them together.

Sounds ideal, doesn’t it?

That’s exactly what an online community website does! It provides a space for people to form connections with each other and helps you create an active and thriving platform. It brings together people interested in a similar subject and helps them achieve a sense of belonging and kinship. It is a lot like a social media platform, with the only difference being that every interaction is dedicated towards a common interest  and you get to have a certain amount of autonomy over the data. WordPress support forums, where people help each other navigate WordPress usage, are a great example of an online community website.

How Does an Online Community Website Help?

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An online community helps expand your vision in plenty of ways! For example:

A community website enables you to humanize your idea

In the age of chat widgets and customer support automation, you don’t need an online community website to merely provide customer support. The more important role a community website holds comes in the form of humanizing your platform by providing your users a space where they can discuss hard facts as well as trivial facts, feel understood and feel heard.

Through a community website, you allow your customers to build a meaningful relationship not just with you but with every member of the community. The more they interact on the community website, the more they will be willing to trust you and consider you a significant part of their lives.

Regardless of how many advanced community plugins you use, the purpose of your website should stay simple: it should work to bring people together over a shared interest and make them feel like a part of your vision.

A community website ensures that you listen.

The one way to ensure that you gratify your users enough for them to contribute to the success of your venture, you have to listen to them. This involves listening to all the insights and feedback they might have. Having a community website where users can easily voice their opinions is a great way of saying, “You value, and we’re listening to you.” This, after all, is the key to a super - engaged customer base as detailed by Amin Ameen, a master in creating relevant social online communities!

Your website can enable users to not just share feedback about your platform and what works and what doesn’t, but it can enable them to actually share stories and anecdotes with you and can help you better engage with them and understand their needs. This give and take will not only help in building connections but will also aid you in building and growing an exclusive platform which actually listens! 

A community website gives your customers a sense of empowerment.

In 2021,social media is king. Everyone and anyone you know will either have an account on a social networking site that helps them connect with people. But the downside of this surge in social media users is the scrutiny and the information it brings. 

Today each and every word you write on your Facebook wall or on your Twitter feed is analysed and read by millions and millions of people. Even though the reach is unfathomable, you never really know whether the information being published is accurate or misleading.

Misinformation and fudging of facts is a known demon of social media and hence, can make users distrust the platform they are using.

So, if you want to feed their sense of empowerment and gain their trust, build a community website! 

A community website where you can moderate the content being shared and can prohibit users from sharing misleading content will not only make you the platform to be on but will also make your users trust you and your website! 

They would feel more empowered and comfortable to share and retain information and facts. This will also give them a sense of ownership and make them more engaged with the community!

A community website gives you a competitive edge.

Despite an online community website being a great way of gaining and retaining user attention, not a lot of people invest time, effort, and resources into building one. Luckily for you, you can use this to create solid differentiation between you and your competitors.

When your members see that you have done the hard yards on building a space for them to interact with each other and yourself, based on common interests and willingness to share information,they will be even more drawn to your platform!

The Bottom Line

A functional platform, equipped with community plugins that make the user journey with you and other members of the website memorable is a must. A community website can act as a miracle - so stop waiting, and get started with your website today!