What are community platforms and why to use them

Community platforms allow you to create, nurture and manage your brand-related community, all in one place that is always accessible thanks to the power of digital.

This technology will give you the opportunity to interact with your industry all year round, increase loyalty and collect data on the interests of all members.

Growing a community is not an easy task and therefore not every company succeeds in this endeavour, but a community solution can keep you connected to your associates in a way that ensures the development of your community, be it physical or purely digital.

Discover the 4 main reasons why using a community platforms can help you achieve your goals.

1. Personalization

Customization gives you a reason to stand out from the competition and, to your associates, a custom-built experience that meets their needs. Through this, you can build loyalty among your community members, demonstrating that you know what they want and giving them plenty of reasons to use and populate your platform.

A loyal customer will then bring additional benefits, which will serve other business objectives. A loyal customer will be more likely to come to you for a specific need related to your business and purchase your company's products and/or services.

Community platforms are tools that you can totally customize based on your needs.

2. User engagement

Community platforms offer multiple resources to help increase user engagement and, in this case, the sense of belonging of the members of your community. Let's look at some of them:

• events, webinars and speeches can be followed live or on-demand;
• specific polls related to your areas of interest;
• notifications alerting you to upcoming events and other news to keep your attention high;
• insert a reward system based on the points obtained fromusing the platform, all thanks to Gamification.

3. Business opportunities

Community platforms offer countless business opportunities due to their functions, so much so that their main objective is to entice and facilitate networking for their users.

Think about it: you are providing - people who meet a few times a year (maybe) - with an always-on, easy-to access e hub where they can find like-minded companies and professionals. The development of new relationships and the consolidation of existing ones is realised through connection requests, chat, the exchange of business cards and the possibility of set and carry out appointments without leaving the platform thanks to the integration with Zoom.

What other tool could provide your associates with such opportunities, and at no cost?

4. Data from your community platform

Community platforms do not only offer advantages for those who use them in practice. In fact, these tools are designed above all for the managers of the community itself.

One of the most attractive features for you, who have the arduous task of managing your company's community, is that of being able to collect all the demographic and personal data of the users who register on the platform. Detailed analyses and statistics on the behaviour of members, developed directly from the platform; completely free to customise surveys with which you can collect the information you are most interested in; overviews of users' interests derived from the events, topics and people they interact with.

Conclusions

We have seen how community platforms represent value both for those who have to manage such an organisation and for those who are part of it. In fact, thanks to the countless functionalities within them and the simplicity with which they can be used, they entice users to use them. They thus become tools that enable community managers to achieve their business objectives in a more agile and efficient manner.