How to build an online community in 8 steps

An online community is a digital space where people come together over a shared interest or goal, geographical location, certain profession, or simply a desired space for learning. Community members engage with each other in these spaces and in some cases, directly with a brand as well.

Online communities exist on many different platforms, including social media sites, industry blogs, forums, and websites owned by brands themselves. There are third-party communities like a Facebook group, Reddit, Quora, etc. and then there are brand-owned communities, hosted by community management platforms like Khoros which make the most sense for enterprise-level businesses in hi-tech products and services, banking, retail space, or other services.

Online communities allow members to:

• Share knowledge, insights, and experiences

• Ask and answer questions

• Collaborate on projects or problem-solving

• Access exclusive content and resources

• Provide feedback to brands or industry leaders

• Build relationships with like-minded individuals

• Participate in discussions, polls, or events

While traditionally valued as a customer service resource, online communities, when adequately leveraged, can offer a wealth of benefits to brands.

These benefits include:

• Increased customer engagement and loyalty: Because online communities function as spaces where brands and customers can interact with each other when managed correctly, that engagement can translate to increased loyalty and customer retention.

• Create brand ambassadors: Happy customers who are highly engaged online are ideal advocates for a brand, providing valuable word-of-mouth marketing in the form of social proof. When brands reward this advocacy it only encourages more engagement and user-generated content (UGC).

• More organic visibility and traffic: One significant benefit of a branded community is it can help improve organic search rankings, making it easier for new potential customers to find and engage with the brand.

• Product feedback: Online communities can serve as a great space for involving customers in the product development process. A popular example involves savvy brands using their communities to gather customer feedback, insights, and shared experiences to drive the creation of new product offerings. Not only does this lead to better product-customer fit, but the act itself can often foster a sense of ownership and inclusion from customers.

• Customer support: Online communities double as robust, cost-effective, and incredibly scalable customer support platforms. While community members often help each other with standard, simple problems, brand representatives can also weigh in and service more nuanced, complicated queries.

• Crisis management: Increasingly, no brand is immune to occasions of crisis or controversy. However, in times of trouble, healthy online communities can serve as a controlled platform that allows brands to communicate directly with customers, helping to keep messaging unified and rebuild trust.

• Customer insights: An owned online community provides a wealth of knowledge related to customer behaviors, needs, and preferences. By monitoring discussions, fielding surveys, and analyzing usage data, brands can harvest insights that lead to major competitive advantages and even propel further product development and innovation.

While some brands naturally benefit from online communities more than others, a brand-owned community powered by the right software and partnerships enables any enterprise to reap the rewards — strengthening customer relationships, driving engagement, and building lasting brand loyalty. According to G2, a leading business software and service review platform, the number of positive reviews and discussions from online community professionals has been growing rapidly year over year.

A quick browse through comments left by community managers gives us a sense of how much value communities bring to brands:

• “... We built a community of almost 40K superfans and brand advocates that help fuel our marketing strategy! The insights we are able to garner from the platform are unmatched...We even created an entire new product line based on the insights we were able to collect from our community!” - G2 reviewer, five-star rating

• “... Online Community is solving the issue of members connecting with each other in a meaningful way. It provides our members a platform where they can network globally with their peers in real-time and allows them to problem-solve together not to mention share resources.” - Customer review, five-star rating

If you’re considering building your own branded community, it’s important first to know the different types of online communities and how they can support your business goals, whether that’s improving customer support, driving brand advocacy, or fostering peer-to-peer engagement.

And you don’t have to choose just one — your community can serve multiple purposes, such as offering product support while also providing a space for members to connect over shared interests. Here are some different types and examples of branded communities:

• Customer support communities: Customer support communities help customers find assistance for specific products or services by allowing members to ask questions, share tips, and access updates. They often include searchable databases, FAQs, and peer-to-peer discussions. For example, Spotify’s community offers support through these features, allowing users to connect with others for solutions.

• Acquisition communities: Brands rely on acquisition communities to cater to potential customers. These online communities typically offer valuable content related to the brand's industry or expertise to attract new members. The primary goal of these communities is to build brand awareness while nurturing customers to purchase on their own terms.

• Product communities: Similar to support communities, product communities tend to focus more on a specific product or a set of services like the Khoros product community, which is for supporting brands who use our community software. Members of these communities typically gather to discuss features, weigh in on reviews, and offer suggestions for improvement.

• Contribution communities: Contribution communities encourage members to weigh in and share opinions and feedback with UGC in the form of contests, photos, and testimonials to help with idea generation and product development.

• Success communities: For some brands, helping customers succeed with their product or service is the first priority. Therefore, success communities can serve as a resource hub for best practices, case studies, training, and expert advice — all designed to help customers maximize the value of their purchase. For example, the Adobe community has dedicated subcommunities for Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and other products. Within these subcommunities, users can:

  • Access tutorials, best practices, and troubleshooting guides

  • Search existing discussions and ask new questions

  • Receive advice from Adobe experts and experienced users

  • Share tips, tricks, and workflows

  • Learn from case studies and real-world use cases

• Engagement communities: Engagement communities are designed to foster ongoing interactions with a brand, like the EX community, which encourages users to quit nicotine and tobacco. This is achieved through activities and content that drive discussion and participation.

Now that you’ve got a solid foundation, let’s walk through how to build a community online for your business.

Before launching an online community, it’s crucial to establish a clear purpose. Ask yourself: Why should people join this community? Your purpose should be customer-centric, aligning with their interests and needs while also supporting your brand’s objectives.

A well-defined purpose ensures that your community remains focused and delivers consistent value to its members over time. To achieve this, test your purpose by sharing it with potential members and gathering feedback. If it resonates, you can build messaging around it to attract new members. An additional tip is to ensure your purpose is adaptable to allow growth as your community changes over time.

A successful community is built around the needs and interests of its members. You should conduct research to create detailed personas that represent your ideal members. Understanding your audience’s behaviors and preferences allow for more effective engagement and content strategies.

You can collect this information through customer surveys, market research, and insights from brand websites and social channels. Make sure you define key demographics, interests, and behaviors to shape your content strategy.

Ensure your goals are SMART: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. These goals should also tie back to business objectives and be monitored through relevant community key performance indicators (KPIs). Without well-defined goals, it will be challenging to measure success and refine strategies.

Tracking engagement metrics helps determine the community's health and growth. Regularly review KPIs such as active participation, new member growth, and content interaction. Use analytics tools to assess data trends and make adjustments accordingly. It’s also beneficial to set milestone targets and evaluate progress quarterly to adjust strategies as needed.

Khoros Communities includes in-depth analytics that gives you real-time insight to help you make smarter decisions, create better member experiences, and provide more stakeholder visibility and support.

How your community is organized plays a huge role in its success. If members can’t easily navigate discussions or find relevant topics, they’ll disengage quickly. Start by considering what structure makes the most sense for your audience. Will a traditional forum with categorized threads work best? Or would a real-time chat-based setup create a more natural flow of conversation? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so think about how your members would prefer to interact and make sure the layout supports those behaviors.

At the same time, simplicity is key. While it might be tempting to create detailed subcategories for every potential topic, too much structure can overwhelm new members. Instead, start with a few broad categories and adjust as your community grows. Features like pinned posts, welcome messages, and FAQs can help new users get oriented, while search functions ensure they can quickly find relevant discussions. Regularly gathering feedback and tweaking the structure as needed will help keep your community intuitive and engaging over time.

For example, the LogicMonitor community has a dedicated section to welcome new members and an easy to navigate menu to different areas of the community.

Once you’ve established your community structure, you can then vet potential community management platforms based on specific needs and requirements to host your online community. The right platform should offer robust admin capabilities and engagement features while also allowing for customization to reflect your brand. Here is what to look for:

• Customization options to align the platform’s look and feel with your brand

• Support for various content formats, including events, peer-to-peer discussions, resources libraries, FAQs, chat, and messaging, along with tools to manage the content

• Strong community moderation tools to maintain a positive and safe community environment

• Automation capabilities to assist community moderators and scale your community effectively

• Community gamification features to drive engagement and participation

• Real-time community analytics to measure community performance and success

• Seamless integrations with existing systems and tools

• A user-friendly interface to ensure easy adoption for both admins and members

• Data security and compliance to protect user information

Khoros Communities offers all of this and more, empowering you to build and manage a thriving online community.

Creating clear community guidelines is essential for maintaining a safe and respectful space where members feel valued and heard. Well-crafted rules ensure that everyone understands what is expected of them and create a foundation for positive interactions. This can lead to higher engagement and long-term retention by protecting the community from toxic behaviors, such as spamming or harassment. Brands can also build trust by showing that they prioritize the well-being of the community members, creating a sense of security.

To make sure these guidelines are effective, they must be easily accessible and communicated clearly to all members. Keep the language concise and straightforward, addressing key topics like acceptable behavior, content sharing, and dispute resolution processes. It's important to also have community moderators to enforce the rules of the communities, as well as keep the space safe for all members.

A comprehensive content and engagement plan is critical for keeping your community active and engaged. By documenting the types of community content your brand will share, you create a roadmap that ensures consistency and relevance in what you're offering. This could include educational posts, product updates, interactive polls, and user-generated content. The key is variety — ensuring that you provide value to different segments of the community while keeping the content aligned with your brand’s messaging and objectives.

In addition, a content calendar is invaluable for maintaining regular posting intervals. It helps your team stay organized and provides a structure that ensures fresh content is shared without overwhelming members. A good content plan also incorporates strategies for actively engaging with members. This could include responding to comments, hosting live Q&A sessions, or spotlighting top community members. The goal is to keep the conversation flowing and make sure that community members feel seen and heard.

Now it’s time to set up the online community in the hosting platform you’ve chosen and start inviting your customers to join. You should also ensure that your online community is easy to find and join. Include clear calls to action in your marketing materials, emails, and on your website to direct potential members to the community. Offering an incentive for joining, such as exclusive content or early access to new products, can also encourage sign-ups.

From here, your focus should be on growing your online community once it’s been built, which involves creating an engagement strategy and content.

It’s a good idea to start small, such as doing a soft launch of early adopters to first test and refine your community before you scale up.

Even with the basics of how to build an online community laid out, it can be hard to know exactly how to start. We know, because we've helped thousands of professionals just like you get started (and succeed).

At Khoros, we pride ourselves on our customers' experience and success. We have over 15 years of experience and more resources than any other vendor to help you create a thriving online community of your own and take advantage of the business benefits these communities create. As partners, we've got the next step covered. Get more tips on getting started with a brand-owned community with this free resource or get a demo of our community management software today.