Online community platforms can be used by a company’s employees as well as departments to work together on various tasks and assignments. The system can help to keep all users updated on the latest developments and ensure schedules are on track.Show more You can manage all your important work materials from a single secure location and provide easy access to others. The app also helps team members to communicate effectively and you can identify project challenges early and resolve them quickly. We also like that teams based in diverse locations can use online community software for smooth communication and collaboration without bothering about geographical distances. This feature makes the app an essential one for companies employing workers in multiple locations. To help you find the right solution for your needs we have reviewed the top apps in this category and you can especially consider the leader monday.com.Show less
To create this list of best Online Community Platforms we have checked 65 various solutions currently available on the market, contrasting their features, ease of implementation, customer service, possible integrations with other systems as well as mobile support with our exclusive SmartScoreTM rating algorithm. This list has been developed by Jenny Chang, our software expert dedicated to the Online Community Platforms category.
For good or bad, social media is already dictating communication and exchange of information, and it is not going away at any point in the near future. Some of you may think their business doesn’t need to shake hands with social networks since they’re only doing retail, but they’d be neglecting one very important circumstance: social networking adds a whole new dimension to the ‘Like it? Buy it!’ process, one where customers discuss, bargain, rate, review, tip each other, and share expectations. That takes us to the very first point of the article: for good, or bad, your online business is socially exposed.
Best online community platforms are in fact customer portals where people can discuss your products, namely: rate them, review them, share them, and participate in events. Having one obviously fosters the sense of community, reinforces customer loyalty, and has a considerably positive impact on trust.
When thinking of gathering customers under one roof, the first thing that pops in our minds is to use an established social provider (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.). The idea is fairly reasonable, knowing that such platforms could run cost-free and unsupervised, but why would anyone then opt for an alternative community platform? Most of the time, it will be because to complement their channels with exclusive and branded communication experiences, and strengthening the relationship with loyal customers.
Choosing solid online community platforms for enterprises or SMBs can improve the communal experience of current customers and random visitors, and may end up popularizing your brand on social networks even more than running groups and pages on them. Let’s check how.
The unexpected facts
The way we have put it so far, running your own community platform sounds like a reasonable solution, but the thing with reasonable solutions is that they are never easy to make. Translated to social communication terms, this means that you have to know your audience quite well, to count on already established relationships, to develop an appropriate resource strategy, and only then pay attention to the social technology that can make it happen. Thereof, let us dismiss some common myths and misconceptions that can hinder your choice:
Online communities are not all about social networking
Yes, you will have a place to ‘receive guests and strengthen friendships’, but you’ll be doing that with a purpose. The idea behind every successful online community is to provide useful content to customers and to trigger discussions that can help.
The question ‘why’ refers to your customers, not to you
When asked why they need an online community of their own, most business owners would say that they want to boost sales and engage customers, but the #1 driver for enhancing social communication is to add value for customers and to make them want to return.
Launching the community won’t be enough, you have to maintain it
‘You build it, and they will come’ is the worst possible approach towards your online community: you need to plan your content in advance and to develop a growth strategy managed by a person who will actually monitor the work of the platform and will be there to provide information.
It is not ‘just another expense’
Online communities are obviously not for free, but they require significantly less expenses for planning, management, and implementation than traditional advertising.
It empowers measurable ROI
You may be told that keeping customers engaged is an abstract strategy and that it doesn’t produce tangible results, but that’s a huge misconception. The community’s impact can be measured and compared to your business objectives—it suffices to plan it in advance and to consider the metrics that need to be followed/adjusted.
You can start your search for the best platform to build online community by signing up for the free trials or demo offered by leading online community platforms providers to do a comparison of the different features. Here is a list of the apps that have received the highest SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our online community platforms reviews that can help you discover the best online community platforms for your business: eXo Platform reviews, Magentrix, Cliqtalk, Jive, Zoho Connect, and PlushForums.
There are five main types of online community platforms:
How to choose the right online community platform: Have in mind that your platform will directly affect the quality of your users’ engagement experience, and it will become the core of your retaining strategy. Therefore, it is imperative to look for one whose format is somehow familiar, and to create a welcoming first experience that would motivate customers to return.
As you can notice, the process is not exactly easy, and requires plenty of targeted research. Before you are sold on a particular platform, do educated comparisons and make sure you choose:
Quick and reliable results: Together with the fact that you get your product’s performance rated on dot, you will rate ad hoc projects with lengthy frameworks long before an actual report has been generated. The more members you’ve engaged, the faster your question would be answered (needless to say, it will be answered by genuine users, instead of random spammers gaining momentum on social networks).
Lower expenses: Implementing community tools and hiring people to maintain them is an investment at stake, but you have to consider the fact that it can be used for multiple other projects and purposes.
Familiarizing with customers: The way to benefit the most from your online community is to create and explore demographic profiles, and develop your product in accordance with the data you’ve obtained. You will be dealing with loyal customers and random visitors, which can give you an insight on many critical valuables, and will help you target audience the right way.
Instant connection with customers: Your customer is your most important resource, especially if he’s a brand loyalist who likes your work and wants to share his satisfaction. Even if a customer is less eager to popularize your brand, you can extract valuable information from his feedback, and build a long-lasting relationship of trust and commitment.
Depending on the size and purpose of your online community, it can be your worthy ‘why and because’ resource. The surveys, discussions, and stand-alone open-end questions may not exactly produce quantitative data, but they can certainly reveal the competitive advantages and downsides of your product.
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Infrastructure plays a big role in a SaaS system. If there is an outage, you would not be able to access the platform. So, you should pay good attention to the software’s infrastructure when evaluating SaaS providers.
Many enterprises fail to ask their shortlisted SaaS vendors questions about disaster recovery, service level agreements (SLAs), and security. These are crucial infrastructure elements that need careful consideration when analyzing a provider.
SaaS is straightforward to subscribe to. All you need to do is go the website and purchase a suitable plan for the required number of users. For this reason, many companies pay attention only to the rate of the package and not to infrastructure considerations. They may also think that careful evaluation is not essential since it is so easy to get started quickly.
But you need to be equipped for situations as such as the SaaS vendor going out of business or their website going down. You need to have contingency processes in place to tackle these situations to make sure they do not have a harmful impact on your organization. It is simple to subscribe to a SaaS solution, but think about the impact on your enterprise if the program is withdrawn by the vendor.
The best online community platform is Wrike. It’s a collaboration software foremost, which offers user-friendly navigation and flexible capabilities with its add-ons. It gives you tools to moderate and manage an entire team a la online community, with shareable dashboards, talk and discuss with your team, prioritize tasks, and monitor the overall status of a project and your goals.
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