5 ways to boost your online community engagement

Why is online community engagement so important? Because it helps build stronger relationships, and stronger relationships mean that customers will be more to be loyal to your brand. Loyal customers bring with them repeat business, which is likely to be the biggest portion of your future revenue.

Here are five actions to take if you’re looking to build stronger relationships through community engagement:

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the customer who understands all of the features of your product or service is more likely use it, recommend it to others, and spend more money on your products in the future. Forbes recommends educating your customers instead of marketing to them: “The more informed and empowered customers are, the more satisfied and confident they are with their choices.”¹ Here are two ways to explain the benefits of your products while also educating your customers:

• Share webinars in your community and social networks that offer customers a way to learn about and experience your products’ benefits.
• Offer Google Hangouts, Facebook Live videos, or Slack ClickMeetings to guide users through product offerings.

Your customers appreciate feeling valued, so boost your online community engagement by finding ways to reward and celebrate them. Gamification encourages customers and employees to share with each other more frequently and more passionately, increasing overall engagement with your brand. It’s also a critical step in building an online community your customers will love.

• Implement automated gamification tactics for everyday actions, like awarding badges the first time an online community member posts, replies to a post or gives kudos on another member’s post.
• Celebrate your users by rewarding them for good behavior with a more personalized response from your customer care team. This can be as simple as thanking them for sharing your content or as robust as running a contest for free products and services.

Leveraging your customers to help is a relatively new concept to most brands. However, you may have already enlisted your customers to assist you without even realizing it. When customers share your content with their friends, they are helping you market your product. Customers trust user-generated content over branded content and are more likely to engage with it. Take your enlistment strategy to the next level and boost your online community engagement by creating a vibrant social hub of user-generated content.

• Reward your superusers and advocates when they create in-depth how-to articles that provide free support.
• Don’t stop with enlisting just customers. No matter the size of your company, your employees should be engaged as well. Incentivize every employee to support and participate in the community — from the CEO down. According to Social Media Today, if customers can interact with company executives, they feel even better about the product or service and will recommend it more often.²

If you’re looking to boost your online community engagement, you must connect with your audience on an emotional level. Videos are an excellent way to do this.

• If you haven’t yet embraced live streaming, now’s the time. A great first step to jumping into live video is to identify your top FAQs and answer them in a weekly video series.
• Use your superfans to share video testimonials about how they use your products and how your product makes their lives easier.

There is no better source of feedback and ideas for improvement than the criticism of your customers.

• You should continuously be soliciting questions, comments, and encouraging them to tell you what they dislike as well as what they love.
• Listening also means knowing when to sit on your hands and wait to respond. When customers do have negative comments, it is exponentially more powerful to have their peers come to the defense of your brand rather than your customer service team. If you’ve followed the steps to build stronger relationships through community engagement above, your customers will become your greatest brand advocates.

A thriving branded online community sets the stage for creating great digital customer experiences.

Learn more about strengthening relationships with your customers with our Digital Customer Care Playbook or discover the potential value of your community with the calculator featured below.

¹ Forbes - "Don't Market To Your Customers; Educate Them Instead"

² Social Media Today - "8 Tips for a Foolproof Community Engagement Strategy"