The Ocean Agency

Building a community has become key to online business development, online marketing and customer service in this age of social media competition. Beyond your social media presence, your company’s own website must be designed and presented in a way that encourages participation, in forums, comment sections or customer response forms. Additionally, content must drive the customer to join the community– it must be relevant, but also intriguiging and  engaging. A constant stream of good content is worthless if it just sits there. Your users have to want to respond to what you’re providing!

A List Apart gives great advice on how to cultivate a community. A community starts with a website that is current and usable, but the communicativeness of your copy and content also directly affects whether a user feels welcome or not. In addition to your creative web design, users need to relate to your community to want to join it; the engaging copy you provide must make a user identify with your brand and community. Information about your company needs to be accessible and interesting. 

Encouraging participation through design is, of course, important as well. If your main community-building source is your blog area, the main place users will participate is the comment form. You must spur a user to comment with engaging content– then make them feel confident to respond with a well designed comment form. Blog Design Blog shows us a ton of ways to make your comment section look. The main consideration is, will your users provide feedback through that form?

Building a community can create new customers and keep the old ones, through allowing your users and customers to relate to each other and your brand. They can better your business if you can ascertain what they’re feeling and how they’re responding to your website and company. By writing creative copy to engage your users, and designing your site to best encourage them to participate, you can start building your community immediately.