The benefits of developing an online community are apparent, whether you're a niche expert, an online course provider, or a Fortune 500 firm.
Among other things, communities may convert your followers into engaged evangelists, boost traffic to your website, assist you in client retention, and enhance your income.
In this post, we'll teach you how to create an online community by using examples from entrepreneurs and online course producers that have created active communities around their business and brand.
You’ll learn:
What is an online community
Why build an online community
How to grow an online community
What is an online community?
An online community is a collection of people who convene in a virtual place and share shared interests, ideas, and goals.
Depending on your company objectives, this might take the shape of a private group where you can exchange fitness programme learnings and transformation tales. It might also resemble an open forum where hundreds of people congregate to exchange materials and criticism on their photography.
Whatever platform you choose, online communities are an excellent method to foster genuine interactions among your fans. They provide your viewers the ability to:
discuss topics that interest them
engage with a brand, online course instructor, or other community figure
learn together
collaborate on projects
share advice and related news
Why build an online community?
Online forums may be a terrific method to bring your students together in one location to debate course content, apply what they've learned, and ask questions. This also allows you to gauge what your audience wants to learn from you.
Thinkific's online community is a method for us to bring our customers (and future customers) together in one place to exchange ideas, discuss strategy, and gain practical feedback on our product.
Benefits of online communities
Regardless of your team size, there are many common benefits to creating an online community:
Make a name for yourself as a thought leader in your field. Grow your network and audience to broaden your sphere of influence.
Make brand evangelists. Increase your business's recommendations by enlisting the help of brand evangelists.
Your audience's feedback. Regular communication with your community may help you enhance your products and services to better serve them.
Boost your revenue. A community will assist to generate more engaged followers, which will enhance retention and, in turn, revenue.
Respond to market shifts. Digital communities help you maintain touchpoints with your audience when being in the same physical space isn’t possible.
Online communities are a natural fit for digital entrepreneurs. Two of Thinkific’s most successful course creators didn’t actually start out with courses on day one. They started out creating niche professional learning communities with Facebook Groups, and were soon pulled into course creation by their communities by request.
Kate Baker created a group called The Veterinary Cytology Coffeehouse, for veterinary professionals who want to learn more about veterinary cytology and hematology. In her first year, the group grew to 35,000 members without any advertising. But she didn’t start her group with the goal of commercialization – her group members began increasingly asking for courses and more information.
Latrina Walden created her course after initially starting a very successful Facebook group for nurses to support them through their very stressful board exams. After overwhelming response to some of her live Q&As and calls in the comments for more materials, she began selling courses.
Both of these entrepreneurs succeeded in creating learning communities, which provided them with the impetus and validation they needed to launch online courses.
Whether you’re an independent course creator, an influencer, or a company looking to support its customers, the following tips and strategies will help you get your community started.
Common types of online communities
There are many types of online communities. Here are four common types, differentiated by the purpose that brings them together:
Interest. A group brought together by a common interest or passion. Like Thinkific’s Facebook group for Online Course Creation.
Action. Communities that come together to bring about change. For example, Black Lives Matter activists forming a group to plan rallies.
Place. Communities within geographic boundaries. For example, your local neighborhood Facebook group that shares about the best eats in town.
Practice or Profession (aka community of practice). Members of a particular profession come together to share professional development tips and learn how to excel at their jobs. For example, veterinarians, or nurses forming a group to further their professional knowledge, or artist groups where members join to master their craft.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on two types of communities we’ve seen be particularly useful for entrepreneurs: learning communities, where members are brought together around a course or membership site. And brand communities, where businesses bring people together around a common mission, goal, or lifestyle championed by the brand..
Let’s take a look at each:
Learning Communities: These involve building a community around a course, or a membership site to enhance value and engagement.
Brand Communities: Businesses and their most engaged customers can form brand communities, where customers can go beyond a transactional relationship to form an emotional connection with the brand and other loyal fans.
Throughout this article, we’ll share specific examples across both types of communities.
What is a learning community?
A learning community is a group of people with similar learning goals who meet to discuss course topics and assignments. They allow students with common educational goals to collaborate on coursework, engage in peer-to-peer learning, and engage with their instructor.
They complement online courses because they enable social learning, peer-to-peer support, and student-to-instructor support. They also help with accountability, as students can be paired or placed in cohorts to hold each other accountable for learning goals.
Learning communities allow your students to connect with you as the instructor as well as other students, and can provide motivation and support to continue moving forward in your course.
For example, Tiffany Aliche has built a wildly successful online membership community teaching women about personal finance. Members of her community are often participants in her online program, and log on to discuss learnings and progress towards financial independence.
Other examples of learning communities include:
Kate Baker, an online community creator turned course creator after starting a Facebook group for veterinarians
Latrina Walden, a former nurse who created a community to help nurses with exam prep before expanding into online courses
Dana Malstaff, who created Boss Mom, and offers resources, community, and guidance to entrepreneurial moms.
Why build a learning community?
Many of our top course creators can attest that learning communities improve student outcomes including retention, test scores, and completion rates. They also improve course creator outcomes, because happy and engaged students will stick around longer, refer their friends, and buy more courses.
Benefits of learning communities
Key benefits of learning communities include:
Social learning: Communities allow students to learn from teaching others and asking questions.
Faster answers: Questions get answered faster in communities, without relying on a quick response from the instructor.
Course production ideas: Our top course creators are continuously listening to what’s happening in their community, what questions people are asking or challenges they have, and using this information to anticipate the needs of their students.
Cohort-based Learning: Cohort learning helps give learners a sense of community that many are craving and improves learning outcomes. Members benefit from a supportive network with increased collaboration that holds everybody accountable.
What is a brand community?
A brand community is a group of customers, partners, and employees – brought together in one place to support each other, provide input, and ultimately develop deeper emotional connections to a brand.
It can be hosted by a company on their website, or in a group on Facebook, but isn’t limited to one or the other, since community strategies can be implemented across many channels.
Members of a brand’s community can be described as the company’s fans because communities allow customers to build deeper emotional connections with a brand and each other.
Our Brand Community was built to bring Thinkific, our customers, and experts that support our users together in one place – centered around our platform and the success of our users. We’ll share some key value points and examples from our group. In the next section, we’ll share some specific examples of how our community creates value for all stakeholders unsolved.
Another example of a brand community is Brit + Co’s creative community – which complements their online classes and membership site built on Thinkific In their community, students can share inspiration, ideas, accomplishments, and their journeys in the creative space.
Why build a brand community?
Whether it’s supporting your customers, or testing product ideas, the concept of online communities has moved far beyond being a social media strategy since the benefits of community can be seen across the entire organization.
Brand communities don’t just change the company’s marketing strategy. Companies report an overall deeper insight into customer needs and product designs.
Brand communities are beneficial to companies because brand-community members buy more, remain loyal, and reduce marketing costs through grassroots evangelism.
Benefits of Brand Communities
Some of the many benefits brands are seeing from their communities include:
Direct communication with customers – communities add another channel to communicate with customers for sales and customer service inquiries
Product feedback – brand communities create a forum to test ideas and get feedback from your core customers before making product decisions
Customer acquisition – communities can attract new customers, or help build trust to assist with conversion
Customers supporting customers – customers can answer questions by other customers, reducing the burden placed on your support staff
Loyalty – having a strong product or service will only get you so far, brand loyalty often comes from a strong community
Customer retention – better support and better customer experience will lead to better retention
To illustrate the value a brand community can create, we’ll share a few key benefits and examples from our brand community.
Motivation and reinforcement
Imagine how impactful it would be if your users could support other users, motivate each other, and share success stories.
In our brand community, we celebrate wins and share best practices to ensure when one member of the group wins, we all win.
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