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5 Reasons to Start an Online Brand Community

Guest post by: michelle crossley

Article Overview: Online brand communities are now tapping into a vast market online. Branding itself is a 2 trillion dollar industry, with the best brands being top searches online. To get your brand in the mix, one of the best ways is to develop a creative online brand community. This guide does more than offer reasons to use online brands: it also offers tips on creating a successful one.

5 Reasons to Start an Online Brand Community

Branding itself is an incredibly large market, worth an estimated 2 trillion dollars every year, and still growing. There are so many companies online who've defined how brands should work, from Amazon to Ebay, that it's interesting to note exactly how they created a loyal fan base. It's about more than saving buyer's money. An online brand community can be defined simply as a unique user experience, a way for companies to encourage consumers to spread the word on their brand. And branding is just that too: the user experience across all media and platforms for the buyer.

Branding communities may be new to you-maybe you never heard of them-but likely you've been on a branding community, from a forum for your favorite author or film, to various ways Amazon hooks readers in with groups, reviews, opinions, and more.

And it's powerful! You are tapping into an underdeveloped market. Why? That's really the problem here: many companies don't feel a brand community is worth the time and effort. Some, on the other hand, have brand communities but limit how they are used. Face it, you're going to go on some controversial forums, with everything from racism to scams. However, when looking beyond how the best brand communities have been built, it's obvious online brand communities are in league with other social media ventures.

So now we know what branding is, what a brand community is, and some of the negatives. Let's focus on 5 more reasons to start an online brand community with a complete user experience, then briefly go over how to better develop them.

Brand Communities are inexpensive

For major companies, sometimes there are brand communities without their supporrt. These are considered "unauthorized" brand communities. But your company, if it gets this lucky, should work with this brand community in addition to your own official. Microsoft is one proponent of this theory, tapping into communities across the web for key products like the X-Box and X-Box 360.

Grow by themselves

Brand communities can grow quite large. There are likely millions of buyers across the world who've posted and chatted on Amazon, reporting in on their favorite products, discussing in groups about the next big title to buy, and more.

Fans love you even more

There are problems in both controlling a brand community and controlling it too much. But if you have a brand out there being spread with fan user groups, you're quite lucky. If you start your own official site, and use the fan brand community, fans will spread the word. It's the social media experience at its best. You can spread the word with happy customers.

Potential to find new customers

And some of those happy customers will be new customers for your brand. It's obvious, but quite true. You hear enough about a product, you see it in a few ads several times, it's remembered. Then your brand community goes to work in developing these new customers, making sure they understand the advantages of your product. With so many loving your service-even if critical of certain parts-you can expect to impress potential buyers.

Remembering the brand

Lastly, if you want to save some money shopping online, where do you go? What if you want to limit what you spend with an auction? Everyone thinks eBay. What if you want to download books or read book reviews online? Often you think of Amazon. These brands are remembered not always for uniqueness, but for dominating their category. After all, Ebay has by far defeated other auction sites. This sort of name recognition is quite powerful, and note both these sites use brand communities to some degree.

So we have 5 big reasons to start a brand community, but we're not done yet. A recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out exactly how to operate a brand community. Really, it comes down to this. You shouldn't limit your community to only chatting about your product; to develop a community, let them share what they want. This makes it an even more popular affair. You should also work with the non-authorized brand communities online, much like Microsoft did, perhaps advertising there or offering specials.

Online brand communities may not be the buzz word in branding, but really they should be.

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Article Tags: best brands, Online Brand Community



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