5 New Features Available in Khoros Communities

We’re thrilled to announce significant new enhancements to our industry-leading online community solution Khoros Communities. All Khoros customers now have access to the following features:

• Community syndication to amplify community content throughout search, purchase, and support in a simple, scalable way.
• Early access to Group Hubs help users connect with people that share their interests and empower them to improve the community.
• Improved search results and analytics to help users find the right content right away.
• Modern content editing tools to simplify creation for richer, more engaging content through pictures, videos, emojis, and more.
• Community integration capabilities through API and mobile SDK to embed trusted peer content into core products and applications.

Online communities are already hotbeds for engagement, and these new capabilities increase the breadth and depth of that engagement by amplifying peer conversations throughout the customer journey, including search, purchase, and support interactions. Let’s take a look at each in detail to see the lasting value these features bring to your brand.

Community syndication extends the reach of your online community by embedding it into your brand’s portfolio of marketing and/or support tools. This allows customers to experience your community wherever their search takes them, whether that’s within your brand’s .com site, product catalog, commerce site, or elsewhere in the customer journey.

This feature makes it possible for users to become a part of your community even if they’ve never been to your online community. Additionally, featuring user generated content on your product pages, such as product discussions, lends credibility and builds trust with your brand.

The Group Hubs feature is currently in early access. This feature allows users and administrators to organize their content into topics based on common themes or purpose — simplifying the administration and management of online communities that cover a lot of broad topics. The end result is that users can more easily interact with the content they find most valuable.

Many communities today have grown to the point that users have organized into subgroups around special interests. Empowering users to manage those groups themselves, and giving them flexibility to create Open, Closed, or Hidden groups just means that Communities can be more engaging. More engaging communities foster more power users, who then encourage more engagement from other users.

When you organize it, they will come.

This feature includes search performance enhancements, such as the ability to leverage synonyms, as well as improved analytics for administrators to monitor and improve the performance of promoted search results.

User generated content is incredibly powerful from a search perspective because people trust it, it is getting constantly updated, and it covers the “long tail” of SEO that is hard for brands to capture at scale with traditional content strategies. Even the largest internal content team would struggle to write individual posts about every niche topic covered in an online community, and even if they could, it wouldn’t be an efficient use of resources. With an online community that has improved search results and analytics, you get users to the right content faster, so they spend less time frustrated and more time engaging.

With these updates, users can now drag and drop attachments into community posts as well as copy and paste from Word documents very easily. This feature also allows administrators to add various tags or elements to posts after creation, to help better organize and leverage content. Whether it’s an employee, customer, or prospect using your brand’s community, it’s important for them to have a seamless, stress-free experience while posting.

Updates include:

• Broader emoji support
• Drag and drop attachments
• Import from document editing software
• Content mentions
• User mentions
• Product Associations

This feature includes mobile app, CRM, and platform integration capabilities for embedded community content and experiences directly into brands applications. The most powerful experiences happen when people don’t have to hunt them out, so embedding a community into the core application increases the likelihood that a user will interact with the community and gain all the amazing benefits to customer satisfaction, retention, and growth that communities provide. Examples include the Samsung Members App that was part of the S10 launch and the Quickbooks and TurboTax apps for Intuit.

To learn how you can put these new features into action, simply connect with your account executive. They’ll be happy to show you how you can use community syndication, Group Hubs, improved search results and analytics, Modern Content Editor, and platform-level integration. If you are not currently a Khoros Communities customer, request a demo to get in on the action.

Also, for more information, please attend our Community Everywhere webinar on September 26th!