Written by Are you looking for a suitable online community platform for building your community? With the wide variety of options available, choosing the right platform can be difficult. In order to choose the right option, you must do thorough research about the various aspects. An online community represents your brand value and how much you care about your audience.
So do you think you can choose any platform without thorough market research? Through this guide, you’ll learn about the must-have features of a community-building platform and why you need to choose carefully. Let’s have a look!
What to Look for in an Online Community Platform?
You must have come across so many online community platforms that make it difficult to choose one. So what are the top things to keep in mind while choosing the most suitable platform? We have discussed all of them in detail. Let’s get started!!
Smooth Moderation Tools
While growing your community, you need to keep many things in mind. The right moderation strategy is important to keep your platform away from trolling and abuse. There is a higher chance of trolls and abuse on public platforms. By assigning roles to your team, you can protect the massive level of spam and abuse.
Your moderation team acts on your behalf to take action against those breaking the rules. However, you don’t have to depend on the manual detection of suspect posts and activities. Instead, an online community platform offers you everything to automate your spam detection process like BuddyPress. The right platform allows you to moderate all the activities to keep your platform a healthy place.
Connections and Networking
Do you think you can build your community without allowing members to connect? People join a community where they can build relationships, and you need to provide them with the ease of connecting with others. Connection features can be in any form like commenting, mentions, question answers, and sharing options. You need to ensure that they get all possible opportunities to connect with their fellow members and the ease of sharing their views and opinions.
Easy and Quick Signup
We all know how annoying it feels to go through a tough signup process. Nowadays, users have so many options in front of them. Community owners need to take care of their comfort and ease otherwise, they’ll leave. You need to make sure that the platform you choose for the online community allows easy sign-up features for your audience.
Community owners can’t push their audience to give more information than needed. Therefore, the signup process needs to be as simple as possible so that it doesn’t push them to walk away from joining. The best signup process includes only your basic information (name, email, and password) or signup with an email option to provide as much ease as possible.
Privacy and Security
Spamming, trolling, and abuse are all very common among most public groups. Also, it happens in private communities due to improper moderation and spam filters. Another important thing to look for in an online community platform is privacy and security features. You need to ensure whether the platform allows you to keep your and your member’s information safe.
Make sure the platform provides spam filters and moderation tools to protect the platform from spamming and abuse. Several platforms allow you to keep your data secure and confidential to share gated content without any fear of data breach.
Performance Metrics
Do you think you can grow your community without knowing the performance insights? Performance metrics are very important for understanding your audience’s behavior and their interests. Several top-level platforms like BuddyPress allow community owners full access to the performance metrics.
You can have a basic understanding using Google Analytics and search console, but for a better and more detailed understanding, an online community platform will be appropriate.
Combining your BuddyPress plugin with the BuddyX theme offers added features and functionalities for better responsiveness and performance. As you improve your community performance, your performance metrics will ultimately improve.
Personalization
We all know how much users are concerned about personalization these days. User profiles are among the most crucial stages of joining a community. At this moment, you get to know about your members and provide them with personalized offers and benefits. People often add sub-communities to their communities where they can engage with an audience of similar specialized interests.
Suppose you join a tech-based community and are only interested in gadgets. When a member sign-up in your community, you can ask them about their interests and specializations to put them under your sub-communities where they can meet with like-minded people. Also, it helps protect them from getting into irrelevant communication and information. Additionally, it helps personalize their news feed with the information they are interested in.
How to Build the Best Online Community Using BuddyX?
When it comes to choosing the best online community platform, the options are many. But you need to choose a reliable and popular platform like BuddyPress to make a user-friendly and responsive community. Furthermore, you need to also look for the best and most compatible theme like BuddyX to improve the performance. The free and easy-to-customize features of BuddyX packed with powerful functionalities help you build a viable community website for your audience where they love to connect and engage.
Winding Up
The above points are only an introduction to the features of your online community. Your online community needs to evolve constantly to be successful. You can choose from the wide options of online community platforms to build your community. But, only constant efforts and the right strategies can help make it successful. Create your online community using the free BuddyX theme to give your audience a place to meet, and connect. Hope you can now choose the best platform for your community to build a successful platform for your audience to meet and grow together. For more information related to the best platforms and themes, keep reading our blogs.
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