What is a Community Platform?

Introduction

Online communities offer a platform for people to link around a shared activity, goal, or interest. Users create a network, develop relationships, and work together by engaging with content and sharing information. Community platforms enable businesses to build these forums, maintain memberships, and cultivate followers. These applications automate administrative workflows and give you actionable data on trends and metrics like user engagement and site activity.

Associations and businesses develop online communities for purposes such as growing their consumer base, increasing brand awareness, supporting consumers throughout the whole purchasing lifecycle, providing a forum for feedback and discussion on products and services, and more.

Most importantly, communities should offer value to end users. Community platforms assist businesses to develop, manage, and assess the effectiveness of their web-based communities so they can strive for continual improvement and deliver greater value to their customers.

Features of Community Platforms

Content Management

Produce web content and monitor how users engage with different kinds of content such as articles, wikis, process documentation, and others. Set up email and online content alerts when content is updated or added.

Member Management

Allow users to produce profiles and join chapters and groups. Often includes a directory or search feature. To handle paid memberships, this functionality can offer membership dues management in collaboration with merchant account systems.

Blog Production and Management

Create blogs for individual members, employees, or your company. Permit users to generate and share content, subscribe to blogs, and organize content utilizing tags and similar classifications. Includes user permissions, security settings, and the capability to turn commenting off or on.

Discussion Boards and Forums

Facilitate collaboration and communication among users and allow them to respond to inquiries, post questions, share ideas, and follow threads. Includes capabilities such as the ability to deliver private messages, add tags and similar classifications to posts and create an archive for discussions, ability to like and share posts, @mentions, and more.

Media Libraries

Upload and store documents in a central, searchable place. Features include ability to turn commenting on/off, share settings, and customizable user permissions. Allow users to take part in library maintenance by permitting them to tag broken links, outdated files, etc.

Crowdsourcing/Gamification

Boost user interaction with your community by using functions such as polls, surveys, contests, and gamification. Invite users to publish scores on their profile and share them with their social followers.

Reporting and Analytics

Includes reports and dashboards for key metrics, including content shares, site interactions, member activity, and more. Schedule recurring or one-off reports, export data to Excel, and view data in different graphical displays. Generate custom reports to monitor unique trends in your industry or business.

Event Management

Showcase conferences and events, collaborate with your partners to get sponsorships, and with your consumers to get attendees. Functionalities include payment management, calendar/agenda building, and online registration.

Benefits of Community Platforms

Gain Insights on Your Customers

Make the most of your online community by creating and exploring demographic profiles, and build your product according to the data you’ve received. Focus on your loyal and valuable customers, and target this segment to increase your sales and profits.

Connect with Your Consumers

With community platform software, you can focus on your customers and their needs especially brand loyalists and repeat consumers. Glean valuable information from their feedback and build long-lasting profitable relationships with them.

Saves Costs

You can use the community tools for multiple purposes and projects and don’t need to invest in additional software systems and IT staff.

Reliable and Fast Results

Community platform software enables you to get valuable feedback and ratings on your product’s performance. Plus, you can get ratings on ad hoc projects that have lengthy frameworks much before a report is generated on them. By engaging more number of members, you can get swifter answers to your questions.

Get Useful Data and Feedback on Your Product

Use the community software to pose questions and surveys, and invite discussions among members. Though you may not get quantitative data, you can certainly learn about the competitive strengths and drawbacks of your product.