In a time of crisis, community matters

In this time of crisis with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, digital engagement has become the primary channel for interactions. This represents a huge shift for many businesses while most employees are also under a tremendous amount of personal stress. At the same time, however, there has been an outpouring of people going out of their way to help their fellow humans n online communities. A brand community is the best way to help your people help each other, and can substantially ease the load on other digital channels.

There are three 3 main reasons why now is the best time to focus on your online community.

1. Provide the right people with the most accurate information.

A community is an easy way to quickly communicate relevant, accurate information across a wide variety of audiences. In addition, it is notoriously difficult to moderate misinformation on public, non-owned channels. With more granular permissions than public social networks, moderation tools for large scale conversations, and a focus towards collaboration-first, it is much easier to both produce more accurate communication AND control inaccurate information in a brand community. Finally, communities are a better way to get your information found by customers who are searching for answers: about 62% of traffic in an established community comes from SEO.

2. Communities are live and living

Community content is built around collaboration. This means people can ask questions, contribute information, and live updates can occur. As an added benefit, the more activity a community thread has - the higher the search ranking is! Instead of fragmenting your information, focusing on your community actually does the opposite.

3. And easy to embed all over the place

With content syndication, APIs, and mobile SDKs, you can link all your various audiences together to collaborate in the community easily by embedding community content wherever you want. Communities are a well-documented way to reduce inbound calls, and that is especially true in times of crisis when the vast majority of people have the same question - and need it answered right now.

This excerpt originally appeared in full here for Khoros customers on Atlas.