Poll: What do you use to build a community around your business?

Building a community around your business is, perhaps, the most important outreach activity you can ever pursue. It deserves such prominence especially because it’s a long-term activity. It’s an ongoing activity, like invoicing customers or addressing support queries.

A community has far-flung benefits across various aspects of your business. It helps you keep your existing customers happy. It helps you win new customers. It helps you reduce the load on your customer service team. And, it helps builds your brand.

Every community starts off as an idea on someone’s mind. But, it eventually has to move to a more ‘conducive’ space. That space is different for each one. For some, it’s a simple forum. For some, it’s an interesting blog. For a few others, it can be a social network like Facebook or LinkedIn. Quora is a popular place too. It’s also possible for communities to ‘exist’ in a combination of these. Let’s take a look at each of these ‘places’ and attempt to profile them.

Facebook:

Most businesses generally use a Facebook Page to build a community. Non-profits and independent communities use Facebook Groups instead. Broadly, Facebook is a place where people let their hair down. They look for interesting pieces of content that are also fun. So, if you’ve got a really serious topic on the influence of cascading government debt on the global economy, you better steer clear of Facebook! 😉

Twitter:

Twitter is really for the ‘keep it short and sweet’ types. But, that doesn’t mean it’s not suitable for a conversation! Twitter is, in fact, a great tool to build a following for your business. You get to have crisp, yet interesting, conversations with your customers and prospects. It’s also a great place for content propagation. What you say or share can ‘virally spread’ to a large section of people.

LinkedIn:

Being a networking platform for professionals, LinkedIn is a lot more serious when compared to Facebook and Twitter. It’s mostly the platform for ‘serious’ conversations at a ‘personal’ level. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn allows companies to have a more ‘serious’ identity. Some businesses use LinkedIn for recruiting employees. Some others build technical/professional communities. Independent forums and communities also thrive on LinkedIn.

Quora:

Quora’s the new kid on the block. Only, he’s not a kid anymore! What started as a simple social network for ‘Q&A’ has now become a marketplace of sorts for knowledge. It’s more loosely organized when compared to Facebook or LinkedIn. Prospects are very likely to ask questions and find answers on Quora before making a purchase decision. Also, what happens in Quora doesn’t just stay there. It gets shared on other social networks as well. So, it’s worth every bit of your time to engage people on Quora.

Your own forum & blog:

At the end of the day, it pays for you to have your own ‘outreach infrastructure’. In a sense, building a community exclusively on any social network means you might have to sway the way the it does. When you build your community on your own forum & blog, you reduce any such risk. You can always use social networks to reach more people for your community, while hosting the community on your own infrastructure. That way, you get the best of both worlds.

Most businesses can’t really handle a community that spreads across all these options. So, we thought we’d ask you and find out what you do w.r.t your community. We can’t wait to see the results!