In a bid to understand how businesses build communities, we had asked a question last week on our poll. We were eager to see what platforms were preferred by businesses to build a community. At the same time, we also wanted to see how much the idea of a building a community had permeated.
As it turns out, Facebook was voted as the most popular platform for building a community. About 23% of all respondents had chosen Facebook as their preference (or one of their preferences). This is fairly straightforward. Facebook has a really large user base and has a simple user experience. It takes very little time to start a community and grow it via Facebook.
LinkedIn comes a close second, with about 20% of respondents choosing the professional networking platform. As a more serious alternative, LinkedIn has several business communities that attract significant participation from members. Businesses, initially, preferred LinkedIn to Facebook when it came to building a professional community, because of its more serious outlook towards networking.
Twitter comes third with about 16% of all respondents in its favor. Although, Twitter isn’t suitable for a community in the traditional sense, it allows businesses to have ‘conversations’ with their customers/prospects. Businesses can address customer support issues via Twitter. It’s also a great distribution platform for content marketing.
Just over 16% of all respondents said they use their own blog and forum to build their communities. This is most likely because a blog and a forum are one level separated from a social network. So, it takes more effort to build a community using these. Building a community away from social networks means that your customers need not necessarily have an account on any of them. In that sense, it has no prerequisites.
Above all this, around 24% of respondents opined that they haven’t yet started building a community. Building a community involves a lot of sustained effort for mostly-long-term benefits. Businesses in their early days might not prefer to build a community, simply because they’re busy finding customers via other means. Also, in the case of businesses where a community simply serves the purpose of customer support, email or phone support might be a better idea for sometime. Nevertheless, this component of the respondents will most likely start building a community sometime in the future.
If you’re looking to build a community, you might want to consider the pros and cons of each platform in detail, before deciding on anything.
That’s it for this week. We’ll come right back next week with another topic. Until the, have a great weekend!
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