4 examples of great online communities and what makes them work

An online community is a community hosted over the web that allows people with a common interest to interact online. Online communities can exist for any shared interest and enable its members to ask questions, discuss topics, share content, or work towards a common goal.

Online communities can be small, with only a few users, or large, with millions of users worldwide. Each online community has a unique set of rules and guidelines based on its size and purpose.

There are six different types of online communities, though it’s important to keep in mind that communities can serve multiple purposes. For example, a brand community might have different areas for users who need support or those who want to discuss their interest in the company’s products and services. Keep this in mind if you’re trying to decide which type of online community to build, as your best option might be a hybrid approach.

In general, these are the six types of online communities:

1. Brand communities: Brand communities are online spaces for a business’s customers to interact with each other and brand representatives about the company’s products and services. This type of community fosters an emotional connection between members and the brand to increase loyalty, but also allows the brand to gather feedback from customers so they can make improvements.

2. Support communities: A place for users to request and provide help on a specific subject, such as an auto-repair community where people can ask for maintenance and repair help. Support communities can also be used for help with purchasing decisions, such as a user asking for help on choosing what car to buy from auto enthusiasts.

3. Social communities: A place for users to socialize with others who share a common interest such as a hobby, favorite TV show, or sports team. While these communities can be open to anyone, some creators like a musician or streamer may create a closed community with extra perks for members who subscribe like the ability to ask Q&As or get access to exclusive content.

4. Action communities: A place for users to plan and work towards a common goal together, such as a community focused on organizing events or raising money to support charitable causes. Action communities are typically led by volunteers or non-profit groups.

5. Learning communities: Learning communities help people improve their understanding of a topic or develop skills by connecting students and experts in a shared space. For example, a community dedicated to coding skills might help newcomers learn basic skills and allow experts to further improve by getting insight from peers.

6. Networking communities: Networking communities help connect people with others in their profession or industry. These communities are typically focused on career growth and finding new opportunities, though it can also overlap with other communities by encouraging discussion and tips from peers within the profession.

If you’re a brand that’s interested in building an online community for your audience, here are some of the most notable benefits of an online community:

• Grow customer loyalty: An online community gives customers a place to ask questions, provide answers, or discuss all things related to your brand. Customers build trust and loyalty towards your brand by actively engaging with other community members.

• Add value for your customers: We found that 75% of consumers see value from interacting with others in an online brand community. These interactions can encourage potential customers to choose you over competitors and help retain existing customers for life.

• Deflect support volume with self-service: By giving your customers a community to ask and answer questions on their own through self-service, you can both deflect calls and improve customer satisfaction. In fact, the Harvard Business Review found “81% of customers will attempt to take care of issues themselves before reaching out to a live representative.”

• Gain feedback: Brands can monitor their online community to better understand their customers, including what they like and dislike. Customers may even provide suggestions for new products and services.

The following brands showcase excellent examples of great online communities. In each example, we also explore how the community achieves its core purpose for the brand and users.

Visa created a Khoros-powered online community to connect external developers to the Visa Developer Team, allowing them to interact and inspire each other so that information regarding Visa’s APIs and tools could be freely shared. The community has more than 24,000 members and features tutorials, videos, how-to guides, and discussions to help developers build payment solutions.

Visa personalized their community for these users, and they were rewarded with a 124% increase in community members. Now, Visa can engage with their community members in the ways those members want, fostering loyalty among external developers and community members as a whole.

This online community has been incredibly successful for Visa by internal company measures, including a 1,300% increase in kudos from their members. Their community has also been recognized externally: Visa won a Dev Portal Award for the Best Community Spotlight, and also won the public vote for the Best Overall Developer Portal.
Takeaway: A great online community can support collaboration between members outside an organization and employees within, leading to better support and improved brand loyalty.

HP needed a way to offer 24/7 support to a global, diverse customer base. To reach their goals, they built an online community with Khoros. Before this partnership, one of the biggest obstacles that HP customer support agents faced was spending too much time responding to logistical questions and not enough time truly engaging with customers to build brand loyalty.

But with their online community, HP can now archive answers, giving customers a quick, simple place to find solutions to common concerns, leaving agents free to engage with customers on a deeper level. In fact, the community has over 2.7 million discussions, 5.1 million members, and over 149,000 solutions which are all accessible to reduce reliance on agents for help.

Their community helped HP achieve a 41% year-over-year reduction in inquiry resolution time, as well as a 35% reduction in agent response time.

HP was also recognized externally: they won the Lithy Award for Total Community All Star, an award that recognizes exceptional community work.

Takeaway: Great online communities can help free up your brand’s digital customer care agents by keeping the answers to common logistical questions in one easily-searchable place.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom saw a surge in interest — with daily meeting participants jumping from 10 million at the end of 2019 to 300 million in April 2020. With this influx of new customers, there was also a spike in support requests and the company needed a way to efficiently scale their service capabilities.

To address this challenge, Zoom opted to build an online community with Khoros — as community conversations would naturally multiply and create a knowledge base of helpful information for the company’s customers.

In the years following its launch, Zoom’s online community has achieved its goal and grown to over 389,000 members with more than 186,000 posts. To encourage participation, the community even features a weekly leaderboard of top contributors.

Takeaway: An online community can help brands efficiently scale customer service, as user conversations will fill out the content and naturally create a wealth of knowledge over time.

Upwork is “The World’s Work Marketplace” and helps connect more than 18 million freelancers with businesses in need of specialized skills. To further serve Upwork’s users, they built an online community with Khoros where people can offer tips, seek guidance from others, and learn about announcements from the company.

Upwork’s online community is a shining example of how to promote engagement, as the brand’s community managers start discussions in several ways. For example, there are multiple posts prompting users to submit their profiles to get feedback from experts. While the brand’s community managers started these discussions, you’ll find most of the responses are from community members providing feedback and requesting input on their own profiles. One of these threads from early 2024 had over 7,800 comments and 914 likes.

Additionally, community managers also post about things like tips for finding new contracts and open threads for new members to introduce themselves. Between community managers contributing content and responding to member posts, the company’s community is a great example of driving engagement.

Takeaway: Drive engagement in your online community by initiating discussions and responding to member posts.

The best online communities have a few things in common. We’ve written extensively about the features of a successful online community, but here’s a shortened list of key contributing factors:

• Brand advocates

• Relevant user-generated content

• Mobile responsiveness

• Crowdsourced ideas

• Ability to track user behavior

• Robust reputation system

• Integration with existing systems

• Personalization

• Engaging content

• Searchable repository

• Gamification

• Performance measurement

Khoros helps brands fuel growth with an authentic, trusted online community. Leading brands use their Khoros-powered community to acquire new customers, increase the lifetime value of existing customers, accelerate issue resolution, reduce service costs, and more.

For more details about what an online community could do for your brand, check out our Community Learning Labs webinar or take a tour of our community management software to get started today.