In today’s fast-paced world, almost everything do is in the virtual plane. You can order groceries, attend meetings online and engage with your friends all at the tip of your fingertips.
This is why many brands, including the largest ones, recognize the need to build a community for their users to provide a platform where they can engage. Did you know 74% of the largest brands have online communities?
Where Does the Value Lie in Building a Community?
Building a community can help keep all your users engaged and provide a rewarding experience to those who want to engage with your brand and other users with similar interests. There are many kinds of communities brands can build and leverage:
1. Support Communities
Support communities are meant to make it easy for users to find solutions to their problems with your product or service. Apple’s support community is a great example of how these work. Users can post questions or answers to existing questions, and each such contribution gives users points.
These points give you access to labels, tags, and titles on the community that makes it fun, interesting, and rewarding for users. In the process, you’re able to build engagement and a lively community that wants to engage with people of similar interests.
2. Interest Communities
These are other kinds of social communities that focus on one or more niches of interest. People love consuming content that they’re interested in, and these communities give them a platform to engage with other users who also enjoy the same kind of content. Video is one of the most consumed forms of media in these communities.
Brands can build interest communities to engage with users and organically get them involved with the brand or product. This lets brands tailor their marketing efforts towards specific sections of their target audience.
3. Insight Communities
Such communities are built around the purpose of gaining feedback, suggestions, feature requests for your product or service.
Many brands use social polls to get a deeper and organic understanding of what their user base expects from their product and implement these changes to see how they respond to it. This helps brands polish their product and meet the expectations of their users, who will feel appreciated and more connected to the brand.
In the long run, this is a great mechanism to gain valuable insight directly from the users to improve your product or service and smoothen out any issues that might have slipped through beta tests.
How Does In-App Chat Help Add Value to Communities
Regardless of the kind of online community you build, users appreciate the ability to communicate with the brand as well as with one another instantaneously.
Gone are the days of having to post queries on forums and waiting for days for someone to come up with a resolution. With Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offering live chat options, brands need to implement a real-time chat SDK to keep up with the times!
Users appreciate the instant nature of real-time chat, and they expect it from every platform they use. Engagement tools that are not real-time feel a bit dated in 2021.
1. Increase User Engagement and Retention
The instant gratification of always having someone to connect with is unparalleled. With the likes of the largest social media brands making live chat the norm, users expect this of every platform. Implementing live chat SDKs helps increase user engagement with the brand as well as user retention.
2. More Personalized Communication
Sending out marketing emails is a thing of the past; brands can personalize their communication with users and add value to conversations by pitching in with solutions that users might have. Users appreciate doing business with a brand that cares for their problems and is willing to listen.
3. Real-Time Insight Gathering
Surveys and other forms of input collection are time-sensitive and often lose relevance quickly. However, by using live chat SDKs, brands can target specific sections of their target audience and collect insights in real-time that are more relevant and offer much more value than boring surveys that no one really wants to answer.
Conclusion
These are some reasons you should consider building a community for your users and help them engage better using real-time chat SDKs. Implementing a real-time chat solution can do wonders for your brand by satisfying and catering to the needs of your users instantaneously.
With so many options in the market, brands need to look out for the best real-time chat SDK providers that offer great support, the best customizable features, and themes for your platform.
