🧭 How Can Community solve business problems? 🎯

Kirstie Macfarlane

The role of community in addressing business challenges is a topic of interest among many business leaders. Through a survey of 400 business leaders, we explored how community can effectively tackle various challenges faced by organizations.

Here are the top 5 challenges identified by our survey respondents and how community can address them:

1. Increasing Customer Engagement:
   • Both social and branded communities have shown success in boosting customer engagement.
   • Social communities, like those on Facebook or Instagram, provide a platform for passive audience interaction and bite-sized content.
   • Branded communities offer a more interactive space for active members, fostering deeper connections and longer-form content.
2. Improving Customer Experience:
   • Community, whether social or branded, has played a significant role in enhancing customer experience.
   • Branded communities offer a more personalized experience, allowing brands to control the interaction and gather rich customer data.
   • Social communities contribute to improved customer experience by providing a platform for customer interaction and feedback.
3. Brand Awareness:
   • Branded communities have demonstrated their effectiveness in increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to websites, and boosting organic traffic.
   • The SEO benefits of branded communities, coupled with their controlled environment, contribute to better discoverability and domain prevalence.
4. Getting Meaningful Feedback (VoC):
   • Branded communities have proven to be more effective in gathering meaningful feedback and insights from customers compared to social communities.
   • Branded communities offer a dedicated space for customers to share their feedback, allowing for easier follow-up and integration with other product management tools.
5. Driving and Maintaining Brand Loyalty:
   • Brand loyalty is crucial for business success, and communities play a key role in fostering it.
   • Branded communities create deeper relationships with customers, making it harder for them to leave and positively impacting customer experience measurements.
   • The personalized nature of branded communities, coupled with their ability to measure customer experience metrics, contributes to increased brand affinity and loyalty.

While branded communities excel in addressing these business challenges, social communities also have their merits. They can complement branded communities and serve as a channel for discovery and engagement. However, relying solely on social communities may pose limitations such as lack of customer data access, brand control, and scalability.

In conclusion, businesses can benefit from both branded and social communities, each serving specific purposes. By leveraging the strengths of both types of communities, organizations can effectively address their business challenges and drive positive outcomes.

This post was originally published in 2022 but has been revised and updated from its previous edition to ensure accuracy and relevance.