Have you ever dreamt of creating a space where students connect, and grow together? No matter if you’re teaching a single course or managing a full curriculum, building an online community can enhance your student’s learning experience.
The challenge? It sounds daunting! But that’s actually not. With the right approach and clear understanding, it is not as hard as it may sound. All it needs is understanding your target audience, crafting your vision, and making genuine connections.
In this article, we will tell you how do you build a community from scratch.
EzyCourse is an online course and community platform designed with online educators in mind. It allows you to build a Facebook-like interactive community that effortlessly engages your students.
However, we've got all the insights to bring you a comprehensive guide about it for educators like you.
So, buckle up and learn about…
10 easy steps to build a thriving online community
Online community builder platform suggestion for online educators
Tips and insights about building an online community based on experience
Let's dive in!
What is Community Online?
An online community is a group of people who interact online around a shared interest. It is also called a web community or internet community.
Online communities allow their members to share their learning and knowledge without meeting in person. Generally, these communities have their own rules and vary depending on their use.
Online communities can be formed organically. But most often they are built by individuals or brands who want a virtual interaction.
For instance, educators' online communities. It can be a powerful way to share resources and encourage collaboration. Moreover, it enhances the learning experience for the teachers and students. For example, Facebook or Discord groups can be an example of online communities.
Importance of Community Building in Your Business
Before moving to anything else, let me light up why it actually matters to have an engaging and well-performed community surrounding you. For instance, have a quick look at the importance of community building in online business.
1. Build brand trust and loyalty
An interactive community is a business concept that builds trust and loyalty to the business. It is not just a mere tactic. With an engaged community, a business shows care about the well-being of the community as they participate actively in local events, give to local charities, and sponsor the neighborhood sports team.
Customers will witness this active and sincere engagement as proof of the business's credibility and trustworthiness. Ultimately, it will enhance the reputation of your business. You will see word-of-mouth referrals and client loyalty eventually increasing.
2. Strengthen network ties
An engaged community also can lead to unexpected but beneficial partnerships. Your active participation in local events and collaboration with local businesses create opportunities for business success.
How, right?
For example, suppose you own a coffee shop and you team up with a nearby bookshop for a books and brews night. This type of collaboration will expand your service offerings. Moreover, it will also introduce your business to the new customers. This type of collaboration can enhance your reputation, which may not be possible with solo efforts.
3. Increase customer satisfaction and retention
The external reputation of any business is also enhanced by its engaged community. Your local customers are more likely to recognize your business value. That’s especially true when you actively invest in making your community engaged.
An engaged community offers your business a platform for building a positive customer relationship. Ultimately, it can lead to greater customer retention and satisfaction. Moreover, repeat purchases from your business.
Research shows that only a 5% increase in the customer retention rate can lead to a 25% to 95% increase in profits.
4. Gain valuable feedback and insights
Direct communication with your engaged community can be a great source of insightful comments. You can gather feedback for your business from many sources. For instance, from social media posts and community events. These insights and feedback are valuable for your business.
You can improve your business service as you understand the preferences, requirements, and pain points of your community from the inputs directly. Moreover, when your business actively seeks and addresses the comments, you show that you value the opinions of your clients.
Ultimately, it enhances the client's happiness and loyalty. Furthermore, when a business focuses on improving the customer experience, it experiences an estimated 80% increase in revenue.
5. Enhance local SEO
An engaged community not only boosts the public profile of your business but also enhances your online presence. Your active participation in local events, workshops, and charity initiatives can drive more local traffic to your business website.
Each mention of your business in the local Ultimately, social media will act as a backlink. It will improve your local SEO. Moreover, it indicates the prominence and relevance of your business in your local area. The more local mentions and links you will receive, the higher the website authority will be.
Essential Features of a Thriving Online Community
How do you build a better community? Undoubtedly, an online community is more than just a group of people. It’s a network that builds on trust and collaboration. However, it includes the below essential features.
Discussion forums: Online communities have spaces for the members to post questions and share ideas.
Comments: This feature allows the members to respond to the posts or content directly. It enables a deep interaction among the members.
Live chat: Live chats allow instant communication between the members. Ultimately, it enhances engagement and collaboration.
Media sharing: One can share videos, and images with the online community. It enriches the interaction between the members.
Posts and articles: This feature allows the member to create and share posts and articles. It can be text-based articles or detailed ones.
Polls and surveys: Polls and survey features to gain the opinion of the members. The feature is a great way to make data-based decisions.
Events: It contains tools to manage and promote community events. For instance, workshops or meetups.
Search Options: Search features that help the user to find the specific content or member easily.
Notifications: The members can remain informed about the online community and can remain engaged. Such as notifications for new messages, mentions, or replies.
How Do You Build A Community in 10 Easy Steps
Building an effective community is not about rocket science. You just need to go in the right direction and follow the guidelines.
Here is how you build a community online:
Step 1: Define Your Purpose And Goal
Wait! As you’re heading to build your community, is your purpose ready?
If that is not so, this is the right time to fix a clear vision of what you want to achieve through your community.
This is important as your team will be in the right approach to lead to your business goals, and it even ensures you up to 90% higher performance from your team.
Well, now let me define some key strategies that will help you define the perfect goals:
First up, you need to know about your target audiences first. This would be like what people you want to engage in your community, know their needs, challenges, and interests.
Start setting the value of your community. This will help your community perfectly fit into your marketing field.
Now the time is to finalize your objectives. This would be like increasing membership by 20% in six months, hosting five community events per year, and achieving a member satisfaction rating of 90%. For instance, you can even use tools such as OKRs or KPIs to set your goals smartly.
Step 2: Find Potential Members To Add To Your Community
Now that you have a complete set of goals, this is the time to find the right people who will join your community. When you are juggling to find the ideal ones for your team, research is the key. Conduct thorough research on the right people that align with your business goals.
Then you can send an invitation to them through all engaging emails, highlighting your goals and objectives. Here you can even get help from social media.
This is a fantastic place where you can quickly circulate the news of your new community. Make all engaging posts and tags and share them through your social media account to get your followers, family, and friends involved!
Even nothing will be more exciting than a party at all, right?
So you can also arrange a short parity where you will show everyone why and what your upcoming community is all about. This is also a great way to find the right leads for your community.
Step 3: Build Trust and Engage
Trust building reflects the importance of building community. A community has all individuals that you even don’t personally run with a base of trust. Isn't it like that? Even clearly to say, trust is the core power of a successful community that will prove to be always engaged to reach the target goals.
All in one here, you need to let them feel that there is something valuable they are going to get. This even helps your community to keep track and participate.
Now the big question is, how will you actually build such trust? Have a short glimpse of what Eriks Dunens, a former Extension leadership educator who has studied how trust works, is saying about it:
"Trust can be looked at four ways." |
These are:
i) Contractual Trust:
This is more likely a completion of your commitment. Like you are keeping your community always updated about every one of your actions. Keep your promises and let them know about important matters and updates that they should know.
ii) Communication Trust:
Try to build open and fair communication among your communities. No matter if you are not agreeing to any part! Your duty would be to clearly and calmly explain that in a very respectful manner. Also, don't forget to gather different opinions before deciding.
iii) Competence Trust:
All in all, you need to make sure you have all trained and professional leaders and volunteers in your community. People will feel more confident when their needs are met with full care through such skilled mentors.
iv) Caring Trust:
Ans this is the last must let them feel you are caring for all, and that is the soft part of the trust. When you show caring in every one of your actions, people believe you’ll prioritize their needs over your own, even if things are out of control. This is a great way to build a more reliable relationship.
Step 4: Bring Them Together And Honor Them
This is the major part of your building communities. This is likely because you have all 10 skilled people for your community, now the next task is bringing them together. Even that is the actual meaning of a community term.
Well, after making trust as described in the previous steps, it will be far easier to bring our community members together. But that's not enough if you want to make a thriving community.
Let me share some effective tips you can follow in this instance:
You can make arrangements for a potluck dinner where everyone has a dish to share and start communication.
An outdoor movie can also be a good idea in this instance, where you will invite your team members to spend quality time together.
As a good suggestion, you can make a community book club where you will arrange a meeting regularly. This is where your team members will share ideas and bond over a shared love of reading.
Even for holidays, you can plan for various engaging festive activities such as a Halloween costume contest, Christmas tree lighting, or an Easter egg hunt.
If I am sharing my idea that I like most is a talent show. This is the best scope where your community members get a chance to showcase their skills while everyone enjoys the performances.
Step 5: Identify Influential Stakeholders
This is the step when you will have to find out the potential members in your community, they are more like super users in your community.
According to Erik Tagiev, who is a Community Manager and Digital Service Specialist at Tre Sweden.
“Super users are the real heroes here—at the moment they answer half of the questions asked in our community, so it’s incredibly important to pay attention to these individuals and create a sense of belonging for them with the company.” |
Here Erik is clearly saying that every community should have some exceptional individual who will have lead play within the team.
They will engage everyone to participate and engage. The best part is that they will be more knowledgeable about the community's products or services.
Coming to the main part! How do you even find such an important person?
Have a look at these quick 4 ways:
i) Find out the more active members in your community than others. Identify who always answers, helps others, or shares interesting content.
ii) Track the members who are truly passionate about your services and goals. They often write your service reviews, especially detailed and helpful ones.
iii) Social media is a key place to find super users. Look for those community members who frequently interact with your posts, add insightful comments, or share their feedback.
iv) And the last and most important point, supers members, are those who are always there for you to make a positive environment for you.
Step 6: Choose a Scalable Community Platform
All your efforts will go in vain if you can’t ensure an effective platform for your community from where each of your members will engage with each other. This is like a single platform where the magic happens. Here everyone makes a strong bond by knowing what each other knows.
There are some online course platforms that offer community builders. So, you have to find a scalable community builder platform that will provide each of the needed tools for everything, starting from building a community to how you will engage them.
For insurance, EzyCourse Community Builder would be the best ever suggestion to go with.
Wondering why I’m particularly mentioning EzyCourse here?
This is because,
Here you will get all exclusive features included that will help you build a successful community.
They will help you make such a dedicated virtual space where your team members will share the same goals, interests, or motivations and walk through a journey together.
If you are making an online learning community, it offers a great flexible space in this instance, where you will organize people and content.
Also, if your motive is something to teach, it gives you all the tools to make engaging courses, manage content, and connect with your community.
Step 7: Invite More People to Encourage Growth
“The More The Best” means this is the time to just not stop with all you have. Even it will definitely not be a successful community story. You need to welcome new members to your group to make it thrive.
For instance, you need to plan for expanding your team with more potential people. Well, let me share some secret tips that truly help you to engage more members of your community.
Tip 1: First, let your existing member act. Joining a new community for anyone can be scary, as they don’t know anyone or are new to online groups. So your team members will be here like a magnet to engage members.
They know your group object very well and ensure that every new member gets a response and feels included.
Tip 2: The best is here, you can invite them to join ongoing events in your community. When you welcome someone, it is the right time to let them know important things like what is happening right now, like polls, online quizzes, discussions, or other events.
Tip 3: And the last part is yours. Your duty would be to make an interactive online community that is personal, friendly, and engaging. Anyone who is new will feel encouraged to engage in such a welcoming environment.
Step 8: Set Up Your Community
Now the time comes to set up your community online. This is not just like gathering some people in one place, setting goals and responsibilities, and that's all. You have done it! You need to check and ensure these few key set-up items before launching it online:
Brand Identity: The good point is, have you set your community’s name? If not, set it up first and then define the logo and color scheme. This will help you keep your brand consistent across different platforms and build trust.
Rules & Guidelines: You are certainly expecting responsive behavior from your team members with well-defined rules. For instance, you need to set a proper guideline for each of your team members.
Content Strategy: Now is the time to plan for interactive content that will attract and engage your target audience. Plan content topics, formats, and posting schedules in advance. This keeps your community’s content engaging.
Moderation Framework: Decide how you will manage and monitor your community. For instance, it will be best if you are assigning moderator roles, or you can use automated tools here to maintain a positive environment.
Spam Control: Your community should be like that if any scam comes and engages with your team. You should have robust built-in spam filters that will prevent any spam or harmful content.
Step 9: Collect Feedback And Act on it
Not just making a community will be enough unless you are quite unknown about how your members are performing. All you need to do is collect feedback from your community, know how they are feeling about engaging with you, and know what more needs are expected from you.
This is more likely the lifeblood of any organization. Well, here are a few effective insights from where you can collect authentic feedback from your surrounding members;
Surveys and questionnaires are the perfect places for getting feedback. This will help you ask specific questions and gather insights on some important things like member satisfaction and needs.
You can even focus on the groups involving a small, diverse group of community members where they discuss their views. This will give you a deeper insight into their opinions and preferences.
The easiest part is that you need to keep an eye on your social media platform to know what people are saying about your community online. For instance, you can use tools like tools to track mentions, hashtags, and comments to gather real-time feedback.
Collect feedback from forms and comment boxes where your community members share their thoughts.
Above all, you can make arrangements for effective customer advisory boards where the loyal members of your community will provide ongoing feedback and advice.
Step 10: Expand With Strategic Outreach
Lastly, you need to be always active with your community. This would be like thinking about how you can improve your community more and quickly reach your goals. For instance, regularly host events, webinars, or Q&A sessions that will keep your members engaged and attract new ones.
As a good suggestion, you can collaborate with influencers, organizations, or other communities that align with your values. This will also help you to learn about their approaches, attract new members, and enhance credibility.
By doing all that, make sure you are not missing the key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, membership growth, and retention. These important metrics will help you understand what’s effective and where adjustments are needed.
How Do You Build A Community of Learners With EzyCourse Community Builder?
Let’s know how do you build a community with EzyCourse.
Wait, take a deep breath if all the above steps just seem like a daunting task for you. I've brought an amazing solution right here for you. If you want to confirm all the processes of building a community from a single platform, EzyCourse would be the best ever solution for you.
EzyCourse is the ultimate platform with the essential tools to help you build a successful business community. Through the engagement tools provided here, you can create interactive forums, groups, and discussions that keep members connected and engaged.
Here is the comprehensive list of all the top-notch features of EzyCourse that help you build an engaging community:
1. Distraction-free Learning Space
It features a distraction-free learning space that will be the key to building a strong community. Like other platforms like Facebook, EzyCourse eliminates external distractions that allow your community members to stay focused on learning and collaboration.
2. Community Building App
Here you will get an advanced LMS mobile app with all advanced community features integrated into it. With push notifications through the app, your community stays active and responsive.
Plus, it incorporates a real-time interaction space where your members will get instant updates on discussions, events, and new content.
3. Flexible Pricing
The best part is that you will find all its premium community builder features in different pricing tiers that include free, one-time, and subscription payments. This gives you the flexibility to choose the right features based on your budget.
4. Customizable Community Access
EzyCourse offers different pricing options to customize your community access. Here you have the flexibility to set up your community exactly how you want it. For instance, you will get options like public, private, hidden, or restricted access.
With open access, you can reach a broad audience and encourage wider participation. Plus, the private and hidden options let you restrict the people to your preferences or community standards.
5. Premium Community Features
EzyCourse provides all the essential premium channels that help you enhance and monetize your community. You will have options to choose the channel from:
Premium channels
Locked channels
Cross-Post Functionality & Scheduling Posts
File Sharing on Comments
By ensuring such interactive and flexible channels, you will not only value your members but also generate additional revenue for you.
Also read: How to Make Online Classes More Interactive
Final Words
Well, that’s all here about how do you build a community of learners being a beginner. Here you have found all the clear instructions that help you make a successful and well-performed community.
Still, if you are concerned about how to build a community on your own or take your community-building to the next level, check out EzyCourse.
With its user-friendly tools and features, create, manage, and grow your community effectively. So don't delay any more! Reach out to us and let’s grow together.
