How to build an engaged online community

Online communities have been long been one of the most popular places to spend time on the web. Providing an opportunity to be social with people across the world, many people love nothing more than taking to their favorite forum or message board to discuss their interests with like-minded individuals. But what exactly does it take to build an engaged online community for yourself?

Offer content they want

Content will always be the first tool on your mind as you go through this. By providing content that people want, you will draw more to your site, boosting your community with more members and making it easier to get people to join. Simply identify their problem or problems and create content aligned to solving this problem.

Create challenges for the group

Online challenges have proven to be an excellent way to generate interest in businesses, and this sort of method can be applied to your community. Providing these people with challenges that they can solve together will give people a chance to bond like no other. Large-scale online puzzles have had thousands of people working together in the past, and this would be a great way to launch a popular community.

Provide a good platform

People don’t like using websites that are designed poorly or don’t work. This means that you will need to take extra care while building your community to make sure that people won’t be put off by the way that it looks and feels. Old-school forums have lost popularity, though messaging platforms like slack and discord are more popular, and this should give you a good idea of what to aim for as you go through this process yourself.

A broad niche

While broad niche may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, it makes sense when you dive into it a little. You need to find a topic or field that has enough people to create community, while also being something that few other people have created communities for in the past. There are a lot of great communities that are already well-established online, and trying to compete with them will be a challenge.

Deal with spam & negativity

While it may be a little bit funny, having trolls and other disruptive people within your community will draw a lot of people away from it. This makes it crucial that you deal with spam and negativity as swiftly as you can on your platform. There are loads of modern AI-based tools that can help you with this element of your community building.

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In Summary

Creating an online community that will engage users can be a challenge. There are a lot of tools that can help you with this, though, and it shouldn’t take long for you to start gaining users. You will have to work hard along the way, but it will all be worth it.