Everything you need to know about online community.

Innovation is easier said than done. If you need some inspiration, look no further than enterprise brands and how they use crowdsourcing innovation. Here are 7 awesome crowdsourcing examples that will help you innovate.

How LEGO uses community to invent new products and reduce time-to-market from 2 years to 6 months, and how you could do the same.

There are many ways for brands to tap into the power of customer co-creation. In this article, we outline the top 6 ways that a co-creative community can help transform and improve innovation and marketing efforts.

There are many reasons why marketing and customer experience professionals should launch a co-creative community for brand fans. From gaining deeper insights to co-designing new products that are instant hits, this article will explore the four biggest reasons to take your customer engagement strategy into new co-creative territory.

Learn the latest digital trends shaping market research and consumer insights. From AI and social insights to customer co-creation, these are biggest areas for insights teams to capitalize on. Our list also includes practical tips for how best to leverage these trends to support innovation and marketing efforts.

Learn what a real consumer insight really means, with unique perspectives from various market research and brand marketing leaders. Discover what it takes to realize that A-ha moment, which can make all the difference between a breakthrough innovation or failed product launch.

The insight that normal folks like you, me or your neighbour Joe can become so deeply and enthusiastically committed to a leader or cause is a compelling one.

The best time to launch a community was 5 years ago. The second best time is now.

Smart and accessible short reads on community, marketing, customer engagement, consumer insights, innovation, co-creation, crowdsourcing and a bunch of other interesting topics.

Resources on customer engagement, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your customer engagement efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Learn how to build a community using these resources, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your community building efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Resources on innovation, co-creation and crowdsourcing, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your crowdsourcing, innovation, and co-creation efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Resources on insights, market research and testing, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your insights and testing efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today. It's time you understood your users and customers better.

Resources on employee engagement, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your employee engagement efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Resources on marketing, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your marketing programs, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Engaged customers are oftentimes the difference between a thriving, successful business and a total bust. These customers do more than buy your products and services, they share your content, recommend you to friends, and are the first to go to bat for you online. Their support means more than just the dollars they spend.

This explains why customer engagement is such a hot topic among marketers and their teams. Read on to learn what exactly customer engagement is, how to improve customer engagement at your organization, and why community should be at the centre of your customer engagement strategy.

Depending on the products or services you sell, customer engagement can look different, but at its core are two main components: relationships and interactions.  

These interactions can take place in-person or online, but regardless of whether you’re engaging with your customers at your storefront or through social media, every interaction should aim to strengthen the relationship between your brand and the customer.

Learn more: How to Increase Brand Engagement in the Modern Media Landscape

The key to customer engagement is making sure you interact with your customers in a way that resonates and makes sense. While Costco’s free and fresh samples do a great job of engaging the people that are physically in store, it wouldn’t make much sense to try and ship these same items to online shoppers (though, it might be interesting to test how well cooked Bagel Bites travel).

It’s important to not only consider where your customers are interacting with your brand (in-person or online) but also when and at what point they are at in the customer journey (which we will talk about in a little bit). 

To really engage your customers, you have to get to know them first - their tastes and preferences, buying habits, how they want to be communicated with, and, most importantly, what they find valuable. 

Now that we’ve established what customer engagement is, we can take a closer look at why it is so important. 

Customer engagement allows you to offer your customers value beyond just the products and services they purchase. Although your high-quality artisan cheeses (can you tell I’m hungry?) might be enough to get people in the door, you then have to think about what’s going to make people stick around and keep coming back for more. 

Personalized experiences, tailored content, and meaningful interactions deliver higher levels of value, and in return, your customer will provide you with more value as well.

Spend more & shop more frequently (revenue)

Recommend your brand to others  (advocacy)

Help you build better products and services (co-creation)

Learn more: How to Build a Customer Value Flywheel

It should come as no surprise that customers who feel like they’re getting real value from a brand will continue to purchase from them. Studies have shown that engaged customers buy 90% more frequently and spend 60% more per transaction. 

This is the clearest example of how generating value for your customers can turn into direct value creation for your brand. 

Not only do engaged customers spend more on your products and services, but they also spend less on your competitors. The same study found that engaged customers were five times more likely to indicate that they would purchase only from that brand in the future. 

Customer engagement and relationship building go hand in hand. When you can prove to your customers that you care about them beyond the money they spend - their needs and interests - you can create sustainable, long-lasting relationships that out-perform transaction-based approaches.

Additionally, outlets like Harvard Business Review have determined that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Investing in an exceptional customer experience that builds engagement means you need to invest less in marketing and sales. 

A truly successful business creates customer experiences around their products and services that are so tailored, meaningful, and memorable that their customers begin promoting on behalf of the brand. 

When people genuinely enjoy what your company does, they’ll want their friends and family to share the same experience. This is why word of mouth (WOM) marketing is considered the most valuable form of marketing.

Establishing customer engagement touchpoints that are worth sharing is an effective way of earning this type of marketing while establishing stronger relationships with current customers.

Increased revenue, loyalty, and advocacy are some of the most common ways engaged customers can benefit your business. An outcome of effective customer engagement that is not talked about enough is the ability to create better products and services with these customers. 

The concept of collaborating with your brand’s users is called co-creation. Engaged customers know your products best, making them the ideal people to help you improve your offerings. Not only do these customers want to help you create better products because it means they can enjoy those products themselves, but also because your engagement efforts have made them feel like they have a stake in your brand.

Customer Engagement, Experience, and Journey

Before we dive into how customer engagement, customer experience, and the customer journey are all connected, we first need to define what a customer journey is.

Effective customer engagement goes beyond transactions and traditional customer service. Customer engagement ensures your brand is adding value at every touchpoint along the customer journey, across channels, and is tailored to unique preferences. It’s no longer enough to serve your customers generic ads, sell them a product, and send them on their way. This also allows you to identify how, when, and where your customers are interacting with your brand, giving you the opportunity to segment users based on their purchasing preferences and habits.

Amanda Moloney, Director, Client Engagement

Our Director of Client Engagement, Amanda Moloney, defines customer engagement as “everything your team does to make sure the customer is getting the most out of your products and services'' and that the customer journey is “more of the outline of these experiences that you adjust based on what you see happening in real life.” She emphasizes the importance of learning from your customers and constantly improving each touchpoint along the customer journey to match their preferences.  

While every business might have a slightly different approach to customer engagement, there are a few sure-fire ways to improve your customer engagement strategy.

We mentioned earlier that successful customer engagement strategies include effectively engaging your customers at multiple touchpoints along the customer journey before, during, and after their purchases. One of the best ways to achieve this level of comprehensive engagement is to build a community around your brand. 

Learn more: What Is an Online Community? Everything you need to know

Communities are created by brands to engage their customers on an ongoing basis. Often online, they provide brands with the space to connect with their customers and biggest fans, share important information, encourage co-creation, and give customers exclusive access to the brand they love. 

Learn more: 10 Examples of Online Communities from Brands You Love

Communities help support every stage of the customer journey. New customers can ask questions and read reviews before committing to a purchase, current customers can discover new and more efficient ways of using products, and brand fans can share their knowledge easily and be rewarded for doing so. 

Ultimately, building a customer community is one of the most effective ways to tap into the four benefits of engaged customers that we mentioned earlier (increased revenues, loyalty, advocacy, and co-creation).

Learn more: Why the customer experience journey needs community

If you’re not ready to dive into the world of online communities just yet, there are several other ways you can start improving customer engagement for your brand. 

Personalized content and experiences are the simplest ways to communicate to your customers that you listen to them and take action, inherently letting them know you care. 

Personalization goes beyond adding your customers’ name to an automated email. It is about delivering the right type of content, at the right time, in the right place. Does this customer respond best to blogs or videos? Do they read their emails in the morning or at night? Do they even check their email to begin with or would a text be more effective? 

Learn more:  4 big steps to engagement marketing

These are all things to consider when establishing your customer engagement strategy and will allow you to form deeper connections with your customers because you’re meeting them where they are on their own terms. 

An online community is a great way to build these catered experiences, as Groups allow members to be segmented manually or automatically based on their characteristics, and your brand is able to serve these folks personalized content.

It might seem like a no-brainer, but in order to improve customer engagement, you should be encouraging and rewarding customers for their engagement. 

This might look like identifying super users and giving them behind-the-scenes access to an upcoming launch, compensating customers for writing reviews and sharing user-generated content, and launching campaigns that get your customers involved in business processes. 

Online communities make it easy to encourage and reward customers that are actively engaged and participating. Gamification allows you to assign badges, prizes can be given to challenge winners, and community members can earn status and praise from other customers. 

Effective customer engagement comes down to the value you are adding for your customers, and where you are adding that value.

Learn more: How to Drive Member Engagement

Two Successful Customer Engagement Examples

Whether you are a brand that sells colourful square blocks or durable spray paints, there’s a customer engagement strategy that is certain to deliver value for both you and your customers. 

LEGO has earned titles like “world’s most loved brand” and their customers are often more accurately labelled as superfans. But this level of success did not just happen. Instead, it was all thanks to thoughtfully crafted customer engagement strategies that put their customers and the LEGO community at the centre. 

Learn more: How can you drive engagement by aligning brand purpose with customer passion?

LEGO products are used and enjoyed by a diverse range of people from all around the world. When dealing with such an expansive customer base, it is important to recognize that each of these customers will likely have different engagement preferences, which is exactly what LEGO does. Beyond engaging with customers in person at their storefronts or online through social media and e-commerce channels, LEGO also has a series of other significant touchpoints. LEGO CON, LEGO Videos, and Legoland are all examples of different engagement touchpoints that serve to cater to different customer needs and to improve the overall customer experience.

The LEGO Ideas community, filled with over 1.8 MILLION members, serves as the ultimate hub for LEGO fans to connect and share. Members are encouraged to share their own LEGO kit designs and vote on submissions from others. They are rewarded with the opportunity to see the very best ideas come to life as sets they can add to their collections.

Learn more: LEGO Co-creates Crowd Favorites on a Global Scale

Similar to LEGO, Rust-Oleum is a well-recognized brand serving a diverse customer base. But unlike LEGO, Rust-Oleum didn’t always have a direct connection to their customers. Often sold through third-party retailers, Rust-Oleum was looking for a better way to connect and engage their customers. 

Rust-Oleum’s Creator’s Studio community serves as the optimal customer engagement strategy. It allows Rust-Oleum to connect directly with their customers and gives Rust-Oleum customers direct access to the brand they love as well as other people who share a passion for crafting and DIY. Through the community, Rust-Oleum can empower brand advocates, foster loyalty, and source user-generated content and insightful product ideas from the people who use their products the most. 

Learn more: Rust-Oleum Gathers DIY-lovers to Test Products, Gather Insights, and Engage Customers

Depending on your brand’s approach to customer engagement, how you measure engagement will likely look different, but there are a few metrics that can be applied across the board.

Learn more: The ultimate customer engagement plan

Earlier on we mentioned that one of the ways engaged customers provide business value beyond their dollars spent is by being a brand advocate and recommending your products and services to others.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that is used to measure how likely your customer is to recommend your brand to a friend, family member, or colleague. It often appears as a single survey question that asks customers to rank their likeliness to recommend on a scale of 1-10. 

NPS can help brands determine engagement on the basis of brand advocacy and loyalty. 

Do you remember the stat we shared about how customers who are engaged buy 90% more frequently? 

Well, if engaged customers are known to purchase more often then a great way to measure customer engagement is through their Purchase Frequency (PF). Simply put, this is how often a customer makes a purchase at your store, on or offline. 

One last memory-testing question. How much more do engaged customers spend per transaction?

This makes Average Order Value (AOV) another excellent way to measure customer engagement. AOV is the average amount a customer spends per purchase and can be easily calculated by dividing revenue by the number of orders placed.

Tracking NPS, PF, and AOV together will give you a good foundation for measuring how engaged your customers are.

Engaged customers are at the heart of every successful business. They are the ones who recommend your products to friends and family, eagerly write online reviews, comment on your posts, and consistently choose your brand over your competitors (even when there is a massive sale). But this level of loyalty does not just happen. It is the result of hard work and a commitment to creating tailored and meaningful experiences for your customers.

The best way to create these types of experiences at scale is to build an online community focused on your brand and the people who love it most. By designing a dedicated space for your brand's biggest fans to connect, ask questions, and learn from others, you’re able to provide more value for your customers while getting more in return. 

Learn more:  Why the most valuable customer engagement is happening outside social media

If you are ready to make community a part of your customer engagement strategy, check out our community platform or book a demo.

Make community a part of your customer engagement strategy and discover how to empower your most valuable asset: engaged customers.

How Customer Engagement Impacts Brands (And How to Improve Yours)

Modern brands use communities to connect with their customers. These communities come in many different forms, but often they are built online. These online communities are digital spaces created and owned by organizations where people gather and connect over their love of a brand, whether it be the brand’s products, services, or mission. Other times these communities are used to connect employees, investors, or other stakeholders. 

Whether you are building a community using mainstream social channels, like Facebook or Reddit, or you are using a community platform, like ours, branded communities can be powerful tools for marketing and other departments. Organizations that launch branded communities are building deeper and more meaningful relationships with their customers. 

When done right, branded communities allow your organization to:

Gain direct access to your customers, get to know them better, and create better experiences

Shape the conversations happening about your brand

Conduct less-costly and faster market research

Boost brand awareness, loyalty, advocacy, and positive brand sentiment

Access rich insights and data with increased privacy

Co-create with your customers to improve products, services, and processes

Decrease support costs as members help each other

To help support our definition of a branded community, we’ve provided 10 examples of brands using online communities to connect with their customers, users, and members.

LEGO Ideas is the ultimate example of a successful brand community. The community has over 1.8 million members connecting over their love of creating and building with LEGO products. Since March of last year, over half a million new members have joined the community. Originally created with Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOL) in mind, the group welcomes people of all ages, whether you are five or 95. The only requirement to join is a love of LEGO (and parental permission if you are younger than 14). 

Beyond being a space for people to share and feel a sense of belonging, LEGO Ideas is also a hub for co-creation, innovation, and collaboration. Members are encouraged to create and share their own unique product ideas and vote on submissions from others. By collaborating with their products' biggest users and fans, LEGO has been able to launch new fan-created products every quarter. Creators are given credit, earn kudos from other members, and even get a portion of the product sales. 

Their recent 90th Anniversary activity received over 75,000 fan submissions in less than a week!

Members’ ideas are not only being brought to life and filling shelves around the world, they are creating content that LEGO can use across social media channels and marketing campaigns, and they’re helping LEGO make better decisions about what product lines to invest in. 

Activities: are fun exercises that encourage members to practice their creative skills. 

Contests: allow members to compete with other LEGO enthusiasts for prizes and exclusive access to rare items.

Product Ideas: members can become LEGO Fan Designers by submitting their very own product ideas.

You can also find communications from the brand through staff picks and blogs, and browse categories based on interests. 

Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community is a dedicated online space for makeup enthusiasts and skincare fanatics alike to come together to ask questions, participate in fun challenges, share photos of their latest looks, swap tips and tricks, and try out new products. 

The beauty of the Insider Community (pun intended) is that you don’t have to be an expert to join. Regardless of someone's experience level, members are able to connect over their shared love of cosmetics and learn from other members.

The Beauty Insider Community includes five main components:

Community Home: the community home is a place for members to start discussions, ask questions, stay up to date on the latest beauty trends, and give and receive product recommendations. 

Groups: community members can join groups based on their specific interests and needs. This ensures members are engaging in content that is the most relevant to them. 

Gallery: the Gallery is where members go to share photos of their latest looks and find inspiration from others. Members can tag products and appear on website searches for that particular product. 

Ratings and Reviews: whether you’re trying out a new product, or have a go-to favourite, ratings and reviews let you share your opinion and view feedback from others. 

Questions and Answers: this allows members to ask questions, view responses from other members, and provide answers when they’re able to. 

As members move through the community they’re adding value for themselves and other members as well as the Sephora brand. The community gives Sephora access to user-generated content and customer testimonials, as well as real-time member feedback. 

According to David Spink's most recent book, The Business of Belonging, members who participate in the forum spend two times more than their average customer and their power members spend 10 times more than their average customer.

They also just rolled out the Sephora Beauty Insider Community Ambassador Program.

Harley Davidson is a legacy brand with a cult-like following. Their brand community, the Harley Owners Group (HOG), is no exception with over 1M members and counting. Operating both on and offline, the community connects Harley owners across the country with the express purpose of promoting the Harley lifestyle.

The community provides members with special benefits, private events, and exclusive access to the Harley brand. These ride-or-die members (hey look, another pun) are able to connect with other people who share similar interests, experiences, and most importantly, a deep-rooted love for riding Harleys.

HOG rallies, events, and chapters where you get to connect in-person with other members.

Exclusive access to HOG magazine featuring previews and reviews, members’ stories, and the latest gear.

A members-only website that serves as a go-to source of information, benefit details, unseen photos and videos, and more.

Having an entire community dedicated to Harley owners encourages advocacy and boosts brand loyalty, which helps the brand maintain customers and more easily adopt new ones. The community has even opened up new revenue streams for the brand, including a line of member-only merchandise. 

Creator’s Studio is a community made for creators, crafters, and do-it-yourselfers. The community connects passionate DIYers in an online space to solve challenges, collaborate, and co-create with one another. 

Community members are able to participate in challenges and activities, provide feedback through surveys and polls, put their knowledge to the test with quizzes, and connect with other members and Rust-Oleum with discussions. 

In a community filled with other passionate crafters and makers, members of Creator’s Studio feel a strong sense of belonging. They gain direct access to the brand they love, are able to improve their skills and learn from others, and receive exclusive access to products and events. 

Like many other consumer brands, Rust-Oleum relies on third-party retailers to sell their products. Without a direct connection to their customers, Rust-Oleum was missing out on a significant amount of value that comes with a direct brand-customer relationship. Creator’s Studio serves as a way for Rust-Oleum to connect with and learn about their customers.

The Creator’s Studio adds value in a number of ways:

It gives Rust-Oleum direct access to their product’s biggest users

Allows them to foster meaningful connections with members, boost loyalty, and create positive brand sentiment.

Through member participation and feedback in the community, Rust-Oleum is able to make better and more informed decisions on products, services, and processes. 

Acts as a continuous source of user-generated content that can be used across channels.

Creator’s Studio is an excellent example of how brands can leverage online communities to connect and engage with their customers in ways they otherwise would be unable to

Duolingo is a brand community centered around a shared goal: increasing access to free language education. Duolingo’s success and ability to scale as a brand is a direct result of creating a true community for its members. 

Although Duolingo’s team has remained relatively small over the years, since launching publicly in 2012, Duolingo has amassed over 100 language courses and 300 million users. This is all thanks to their committed community members who developed the content needed to scale these language courses. 

Duolingo’s Incubator is the program that allows these passionate members to contribute ideas and create new language courses. Beyond just encouraging members to connect and share online, Duolingo has also empowered its members to organize in-person events where language learners meet up and learn from each other in their own communities. 

Engaged customers are often the best-equipped people to support other customers. When you provide these people with the space and capacity to contribute and help each other, you can see how quickly they start making an impact. “By giving your customers the opportunity to connect and support each other, you can deliver exponentially more value at a fraction of the cost of traditional business tactics,” says David Spinks, co-founder of CMX and author of The Business of Belonging.

Duolingo has created a global community of language learners. Members get access to better content, are able to improve their language skills, connect with other people who share the same goals, and feel a sense of ownership and belonging as they contribute their own knowledge to help community growth. In turn, Duolingo is able to improve its product and service offerings and scale its business at large.

The Salesforce Trailblazer Community is another excellent example of a community built around a specific product and shared goals. The community brings Salesforce users (Trailblazers) together to learn, collaborate, and get the most out of their unique Salesforce implementations. 

The most powerful part of the Trailblazer Community is its ability to empower users. The community has transformed everyday product users into passionate and engaged community members. Trailblazers are more than just frequent users of the Salesforce product, they are game-changers, leaders, and life-long learners who want to excel in both their careers and communities. 

The community focuses on learning and collaboration and is designed to support these goals.

Home: acts as a central place for navigation and highlights top contributors in the community.

Answers: allows members to easily navigate and search for topics they may need help with. 

Help: gives members access to detailed content and resources to help them with their Salesforce product(s) and experience. 

Events: browse in-person and virtual events to connect with peers and experts. [insert joke about how wild the Salesforce conferences are known to get]

Collaboration: acts as a navigation feed to share content, view posts from others, and visit other member profiles. Profiles show members' contribution levels by displaying the number of posts and comments they’ve contributed, comments and likes received, and titles such as ‘top influencer’.

IdeaExchange: allows members to share ideas, collaborate with others, and solve business challenges. 

Featured Groups: members can join specific groups based on interests, areas of expertise, or challenges they’re trying to overcome. 

Known issues: enhances trust between members and Salesforce by being transparent about known issues within the community and the Salesforce product.

Through the community, Trailblazers are increasing their return on investment, learning how to use Salesforce products more efficiently, and creating life-long connections with other members along the way. A 2019 Impact Survey revealed that more than 80% of active community members say that participating in the community helped them increase return on their Salesforce investment, improve productivity, and increase adoption.

While members gain value from the community, Salesforce builds an engaged and loyal customer base and reduces the need for customer support because members are supporting each other.

Peloton’s branded community has a few different moving parts. Members can find and follow friends on their Peloton accounts. Peloton’s website has a community section that highlights member stories, but the real Peloton community is the Official Peloton Member Page on Facebook. 

The community has over 400,000 passionate Peloton users and enthusiasts who actively connect and share with other members.

Get help using Peloton products and finding the right classes 

Share fitness updates and weight loss journeys

Share recent struggles, successes, and triumphs

As members continue to grow, connect, and get to know each other, they even feel comfortable discussing non-exercise-related things, like mourning the recent loss of a loved one or overcoming life challenges. The Peloton Community is a community in its truest definition, “a group of people that care about each other & feel they belong together.”

Hey Peloton, let us know when you’re ready to make the shift from a Facebook group to a Community Platform, we’d be happy to help!

Unlike the first seven examples we’ve provided where brands formed their own communities, the Tech Ladies community is the brand. 

What started as a small coffee shop meet-up in 2015 has since exploded into a community of over 100,000 women and non-binary people in tech connecting both on and offline. The objective of the Tech Ladies community is to share experiences and stories and to support career development in the world of technology.

With both free and paid options, the Tech Ladies community provides:

Community members are able to network professionally and personally with other members, connect over shared experiences as women and non-binary people in the tech space, and give advice and receive feedback. The community has nurtured a sense of security and a safe space for like-minded people with similar interests and goals.

The Tech Ladies community is a testament to how some of the strongest communities are built on shared experiences. 

When people genuinely love using your products, it's likely that they’re looking to connect with other people who share this same passion. The Instant Pot Community on Facebook is no exception. The community has a whopping 3M members that have joined to connect with other regular Instant Pot users.

Labeled as a social learning group, the community sees about 10K posts per month from people sharing, connecting, and learning. It’s totally public and free to join, all you need is an Instant Pot and a love for cooking. 

What makes this brand community such a success is people’s willingness and desire to contribute and see what others are doing - members are always eager to share and learn from each other.

The Instant Pot Community allows members to: 

Troubleshoot problems (even down to how altitude affects cook time)

When you create a shared space for the people who use your products the most to connect and share, what you get in return is an always-on community that you can tap into for insights or check the pulse of your customers. 

This last branded community example is a true support community, in every sense of the word (sorry, last pun). A Bra That Fits started as a subreddit (r/ABraThatFits) in 2015, and has since grown to over 277K members. Like ‘Tech Ladies’, the community came first, and through its growth, it formed the ‘A Bra That Fits’ brand. 

In addition to Reddit, they also have an active following on Instagram, TikTok, and a healthy community of 10K people on Facebook. While most brand communities are contained in one space, A Bra That Fits has proven you can find success in going where your audience already is. 

If you haven’t caught on already, the community’s objective is to educate people on bra sizing and help them find, well, a bra that fits.

Resources, content, and knowledge sharing (including their custom calculator)

Open discussions with people who share similar struggles

The community even offers a ‘Bra Swap’ and ‘Random Acts Of Bras’ for members to access and give away free bras to those who need them.

A Bra That Fits is a community formed around knowledge sharing and it found success connecting members and giving them the space and the resources needed to overcome their shared struggle.

Well, there you have it! 10 examples of brands using online branded communities to connect with their members, and connect their members with each other. We even snuck in a few examples of branded communities built on our very own Community Platform (oh hey, LEGO and Rust-Oleum!) 

If you are interested in learning more about online branded communities, and how your brand could benefit from one, check out our Platform Features, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and visit our learn page.

10 concrete examples of branded communities and how they're used.

10 Examples of Online Communities from Brands You Love

When it comes to defining what an online community is, it is important to first understand the concept of community itself. While definitions vary by source, what is common across each interpretation is people. People, connection, and a sense of belonging are at the centre of every community, on or offline. 

Fabian Pfortmüller defines a community as “a group of people that care about each other & feel they belong together.” This sentiment holds true for online communities as well, but instead of gathering in person, members gather and connect online, irrespective of physical location.  

Take a moment to think about the online communities you may be a part of, perhaps without even realizing that that’s what they are. Maybe you keep up-to-date with old friends in a university alumni group on LinkedIn, regularly contribute homemade recipes to a Facebook group like Mom’s Best Recipes, or belong to a super niche subreddit about a hobby you picked up abroad (don’t worry, we don’t judge). 

An online community is a digital space where people come together over common interests and experiences, mutual goals and actions, or a shared purpose. Every online community comes with its own unique set of norms, rules, and guidelines, depending on the community’s objectives.

Community objectives can range anywhere from holding one another accountable to solving real-world challenges. The objective of wallstreetbets (WSB) subreddit is to rally amateur investors around exciting stock picks. The objectives of the Salesforce Trailblazer Community are to bring Salesforce users together for local meet-ups and to help each other get the most out of their unique Salesforce implementations. 

The Different Types of People in Communities

Every online community, whether it’s a local Hot Wheels collector club or a national environmental association, has three distinct groups that engage or interact with it.

Every online community is unique because its members and the ways they engage with the community and one another are unique. Each member has their own participation preferences, and some contribute and engage more than others. 

A recent study found that there are two distinct participation styles, both equally important to the success of an online community. 

Members with stronger shared interests tend to interact more frequently than members with less in common. In general, frequent interactors tend to contribute ideas, whereas infrequent interactors provide feedback and conversation around those ideas. 

Although frequent interactors make up only about 20% of the member base in most communities, they account for almost 80% of the interactions. This closely follows the well-known Pareto Principle. 

Community visitors are the people that “drop by” a community but aren’t actively participating. They get value from the community by observing, learning, and being inspired, even if they aren’t the ones engaging. 

Communities support search engine optimization (SEO) for brands by providing a constantly updated source for valuable content. Visitors who reference content from the community help build out the link footprint that improves search rankings.

To ensure community health and vibrancy, there are two common community roles: community managers and community moderators. 

A community manager’s role is to ensure that the community and its members are active and engaged. They design programs filled with interesting and valuable things to do and activities that will help make sure community members are engaged and keep coming back.  

Community moderators are responsible for guiding participation and ensuring that community guidelines are being followed. They are often thought of as the party hosts.

A common form of an online community is a branded online community. Brand communities are created and owned by organizations, and they are online gathering places where people connect over their affinity for a brand, its products, its services, or its mission. Other times brand communities are used by organizations to connect with employees, partners, or other important stakeholders. 

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