Building an online, engaged community has a ton of advantages - a community gives you feedback for your service, helps you achieve network effects through referrals because members bring their friends, the increased engagement helps with customer retention and last but not the least - it's just so much fun to be with people who support you on your mission!
In simple words, with community, you can identify and engage with your early adopters, your top customers and your brand advocates.
Let's dive deeper with the benefits of community building:
Increase engagement
Building a community helps improve engagement. You only need a platform where your customers can be engaged.
Get Customer Feedback
Your community will tell you what they like and what they don't. You can receive their valuable feedback and customize your product.
Earn Your Customers’ Loyalty
Being honest and transparent while engaging with your customers helps you gain their trust and loyalty.
But how do we build a community when we're starting from scratch?
At Casa, we've taken a look at some of the best tools for building community and categorized them accordingly.
Here are some exciting tools that can help you with building community:
Popular tools for discussions
Discussions enable you to bring your community together, engaging with your early adopters or identifying your top customers over a platform via text, audio or video.
Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are spaces on social media where friends, acquaintances or people with similar interests assemble to discuss various topics.
Pros:
- Enables a space for easy discussions
Cons:
- You do not own the community audience
- You do not own the domain
- You have limited control over the platform
- Categorization of topics is an issue
Negative impact on SEO because you do not own the domain
Slack
Slack is your digital HQ
Slack is a platform for group messaging and collaboration. With Slack you can have open discussions, direct messaging, private groups as well as file sharing.
Pros:
- Provides integration with Google drive and calendar
Cons:
- You do not own the community audience
- You cannot assign members tags and you cannot segment members into advocates, top customers etc.
- You do not own the domain
- You have limited control over the platform
Negative impact on SEO because you do not own the domain
Your place to talk or hangout
Discord is a platform where you can connect with your community over chat, voice, or video. It is popular among the gaming community members, but some businesses still use it.
Pros:
- Create video or audio calls without giving out personal information
Cons:
- You do not own the community audience
- You do not own the domain
- You have limited control over the platform
Negative impact on SEO because you do not own the domain
Product Updates Tools
A tool for product and community update is used to let users record changes and updates chronologically. Bug fixes, new features or updates - changelog tools help you record all this.
Here are some changelog tools which you can use to make announcements.
Update and engage users effortlessly
Beamer is a customer satisfaction tool. It has changelog feature, notification feature and Net Promoter Score .
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Help improve customer engagement
- Easy to embed
Cons:
- Difficult to create targeted campaigns, eg. early adopter campaigns
- No community hub / landing page
Headway
Keep Customers in the loop about your product.
Headway is another app that gives the changelog feature. It is easy to use but does not offer many features.
Pros:
- Simple design
Cons:
- Difficult to create targeted campaigns, eg. early adopter campaigns
- No way to get customer feedback
- No Upvoting feature
AnnounceKit
Notify your users anywhere they are
AnnounceKit is a user communication platform that provides announcements, product updates, and company news.
Pros:
Easy to set-up
Provide quick support
Cons:
Difficult to create targeted campaigns, eg. early adopter campaigns
They offer less integrations
It offers Custom branding, Email templates and Advanced Customisation.
You can segment your users and right update to the right user.
Pros:
- Great Sales and Support team
- Single space to communicate with all customers
Cons:
- Lack of email customisation- Difficult to create targeted campaigns, eg. early adopter campaigns
Product feedback tools
Every brand needs feedback from the customers. Feedback helps you understand your customers better. It gives you insight on what will work best for your target customers and what products from the brand they wish to buy.
Creating spreadsheets might help you to do this but, its too much work and might not alway be ideal. Poor analysis will lead to downfall of the brand. Here are some tools that help you get feedback from your customers.
Canny
Build better products with customer feedback
Canny offers a platform for users to post and vote on ideas for any topic. Its main feature is to collect customer feedback.
Pros:
- Easy to use interface
Cons:
- No way to create targeted campaigns, eg. early adopter campaigns
- Pre-defined category search
- No dark theme available
Instant feedback to build better products.
With Upvoty you can create boards and product roadmap and let your users participate in your product feedback. You can view and manage your user feedback data in the same place.
Pros:
- Offers a lot of customisation options
Cons:
- Difficult to create targeted campaigns, eg. early adopter campaigns
Hellonext.co
Go from feature request to launch
This is a product feedback tool which allows you to get upvotes on new features. With hellonext, you can prioritize which features works best for your customers.
Pros :
- Great customer support
Cons :
- Difficult to create targeted campaigns, eg. early adopter campaigns
Nolt.io
Feedback boards your users will love
Nolt helps you collect feedback from anyone that can provide valuable feedback - friends, customers, employees, or any other group. You can prioritize comments and create roadmaps just with a few clicks.
Early Adopter Tools
There are no tools explicitly created for early adopter and beta programs, startups use forms on their own website to get early adopters.
Survey Tools
Survey tools allow you to collect responses from your target customer for your questions.
Typeform
Forms that perform
Typeform helps in collecting and sharing information at your comfort.
It is a great platform for creating surveys without prior knowledge of coding.
Pros :
- No knowledge of coding needed.
Cons :
- No test mode.
- No review feature.
Automate work, Innovate faster
Formstack enables you to automate your business processes. You can capture data with forms, populate information into custom documents.
Pros :
- Easy to collect data and keep it clean.
Cons :
- Bad customer support.
- Event Management Tools
Event management tools help you to manage professional and academic conferences, trade exhibitions or any other small events on a single software. These softwares let you manage virtually.
Luma
Activate your community.
You can host virtual classes, record live shows and educate communities.
Pros :
Cons:
But wait, why use so many different apps when CASA is here to be your go-to buddy for your community building needs?
The problem with using so many tools for community management / here is why you should avoid using so many different apps for your different needs and use Casa instead.
Collecting data from so many different sources and compiling them together will take up your precious time. After compilation will come the part where you would have to analyze big data to get a clear picture of your brand.
It is also very expensive to use so many tools
Different tools means different subscription fees to pay. Half the time you do not even utilize full resources of the app that you pay for.All these tools are good as point solutions, but not for a holistic and engaged community
Community building is cumbersome when using so many different platforms; to build a good community it is better to use a single platform.
Wait for the best part, while all these apps allow you to do these things on different apps, with Casa you can do most of the above mentioned things on a single platform.
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Casa is an all in one solution for engaging and managing your community.
