4 Tips For Choosing A Community Engagement Tool
With the continued rise of digital engagement and online communities, brands need to utilize the right tools to keep their audience members engaged. To achieve this, finding a trusted community engagement tool to rely on is the best strategy.
Businesses are picky with the community engagement tools they use not all community engagement tools will work for your brand.
Luckily, in this article, you will find all the tips you need to choose the most suitable digital community engagement tool that works best for your organization. The most suitable depends on your goals and your members, so knowing their needs is paramount, as we shared in this article. Beyond knowing their current needs, think ahead to future needs, that’s where digital transformation brings value to you and them.
Before we dive into details, here’s a definition of a community engagement tool.
What is a community engagement tool?
When users think of a community engagement platform, they typically think of places where they can participate in a discussion forum or interact with relevant audiences. But it can be so much more than that - in fact, it should be more.
A digital community engagement tool is exactly what it sounds like - a tool for brands to streamline the community engagement process and keep their product or service top of mind for community members.
A great community engagement tool comes packed with everything you need in one platform to interact with an online community.
Tips for choosing the right community engagement tool
Here are some key factors to consider when looking for the right community engagement toolkit for your business.
1. Use an all-in-one platform
One of the best things you can do as a business, in any case, is to make things easier for you and your audience or community members.
Having one place where you can manage everything, like broadcasting virtual events and webinars, posting on community forums, interacting with participants, and sharing gated content or association updates, is an essential part of streamlining your community engagement process.
While it’s beneficial for you, it’s also an incredible resource for your audience. When there is a functional community platform they can go to register for and attend events, get support, meet with groups, and provide feedback, it makes them more likely to consistently participate in your brand’s conversations and interests.
2. Choose a platform with multiple community engagement features
Not every all-in-platform is built the same. Some community engagement toolkits don’t truly have everything you will need.
When sifting through the different tools, ensure that your chosen platform lets you manage multiple projects so that you can prioritize things like project updates and stakeholder engagement.
A great community engagement platform should allow you the capabilities to:
- Host events, meetings, roundtables, and webinars
- Offer learning experiences and certification opportunities
- Deliver exclusive content
- Create a space for your audience to connect with like-minded leaders, offer feedback to your brand, and contribute ideas to larger like-minded groups
3. Make sure you can effectively measure performance
To constantly create new ideas and elevate your community engagement, you have to be able to measure the performance of your efforts.
Having data and analytics tools in your community engagement platform helps you make data-driven decisions and garner community input and feedback to use in your team’s decision-making process. This helps to improve your overall brand strategy.
4. Use an intuitive, easy-to-use platform
A platform is only beneficial to you if you know how to use it. The partner you choose must have resources to support your education and thought leadership to truly advance your organization. Whatever platform you choose should be one that your audience finds easy to navigate and engage with your brand.
An online community platform is more enticing if it’s fun to use - no one will want to continue to use a platform that is not intuitive.
The bottom line is to make sure your tools for events, discussion boards, learning experiences, and other activities you and your community members will be using are easy to access.
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