Making Online Communities Feel Like The Real Thing
Online communities are becoming more and more prevalent as we move further into the digital age. As humans, we crave the essence of community and belonging to a group of people with shared interests or with those who accept each other for their unique qualities and differences. According to Maslow’s Theory of Motivation, the need to belong is two tiers above the need for air, food, water, and only one tier above the need for safety shows. This shows that the need to belong is a driving force that defines choices made by humans to continue to climb the tiers to esteem and self-actualization. But how can we make these online communities feel as powerful and fulfilling as the ones we have in reality? Below, I outline ways to make our virtual communities feel just as special as our in-person ones.
Find & Research Your Audience
Identifying the audience you want to build your community around is key to succeeding. Knowing where that audience is to engage with them is even more critical. Think about the demographics and psychographics of your audience. How old are they? What are their interests? What could their everyday life look like? And what social platforms are they present on? This will help you establish the tone of your community, the type of content you will share, and where you’ll share it. This will also allow you the opportunity to truly operate the community with the audience’s best interests at heart and build trusting relationships. You may even find opportunities to cross communicate on different social media platforms where your audience is already established.
Go Out Of Your Way
Offer something to your audience that keeps them coming back. Showing that you’re not just trying to promote a brand or product but want to get to know your audience and provide substance is always appreciated. This sort of action could look like offering helpful information or insight, sharing recipes or personal experiences, or maybe just lending an ear and showing engagement with the audience members. Make the interactions as genuine as possible to generate a sense of trust and belonging. Make yourself relatable and be HUMAN. You can even go out of your way in a sense by highlighting community members through digital shout-outs, birthday wishes, promotions, celebratory posts, or even personally mailing community members. These sort of steps of going out of your way will build a more profound feeling of community within your audience.
Make Communication More Face-to-Face
With online connections, we lack face-to-face touch and speech and rely heavily on text and emojis as our form of communication. This can lose that special spark of being in a community. Think about ways to leverage different means of digital communications to make your community feel more face-to-face. Examples include:
- Have a weekly zoom meeting for your community to join
- Host a LIVE where you invite attendees to chat and conversate on
- Host in-person meetings if applicable
- Post videos and encourage other community members to as well…this brings me to my next point.
Hand the Mic Over
Some of the best online communities are structured around close-knit bonds and conversations. Avoid being a speaking head with just a one-way stream of communication; instead, hand the mic over to other community members to share their experiences, tips, and content related to what the page is about. This helps develop deeper, multi-dimensional relationships and encourages others to partake in conversation and speak up. There will be a sort of snowball effect. Once other community members start seeing others participate, they will feel more comfortable speaking up, which will transcend endless conversation and bonding down the road. You will also learn more about your community members as they speak up more and how to tailor conversations to generate more engagement.
The key to building a thriving community is to foster a space where your target audiences feel like they belong and want to provide to the online conversations. Thinking about where we are heading in the digital age, creating communities may become more accessible with newer 3-D digital landscapes like the Metaverse and how these are used to transcend online communities in the coming decades. Additionally, that same human urge that Maslows theory outlines may also be a driving force for online communities to grow and sustain. Here is a quote by Benjamin Vaughan to close out:
So let’s make these communities as genuine, real, and powerful as possible.
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