DEV Community: Modern Community Platform

5 Tips for Building a Stronger Brand Community

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 13:09:40 +0000

Originally published by UUKI blogs

5 Tips for building a stronger Brand Community

You’re reading this because you’ve been meaning to build a community around your brand, but numerous things are holding you back. Or maybe you’ve already tried to build a community, but that ended in a fiasco due to a lack of participation and engagement of community members.

Hang on then we will discuss all the crucial tips that are needed for building a strong brand community which you really need to know in order to be more engaging and provide you with a robust way of building a brand community.

But before we dive into it, let’s discuss a bit about brand community and its benefits that will help you clear the air and be more confident about the basics of building a brand community.

What exactly is a Brand Community?

“A brand community is a group of customers who are brought together by their common interest in a brand’s products & services”

A brand community showcases brand loyalty at its best. It provides a platform for all loyal customers to interact with one another and the brand. These customers engage with your brand’s content on a deep level and help in building a strong image of your brand in the market.

It could be anything from a Facebook group to an online forum on the brand’s website. A brand community is different from brand awareness. They are just not like general customers. They are the people who follow the entire brand’s feeds on social media, share their views about your products with others and serve as a powerful tool to spread the word about what your company offers.

‍What are the benefits of a stronger Brand Community?

‍There are numerous benefits of building a strong brand community. If done precisely, you can turn it into an exceptionally powerful tool, which can help the brand in various ways. Building a loyal customer base online is the sole purpose of many online communities; also there are some key benefits from which you can make the most out of it. Some of them are as follows:

1. Brand Visibility:

Building an interactive online brand presence is a key to growing engagement. The bigger your community, the more your brand will be visible to people. The more people will talk about it, the more people will know you. With this, more will be the probability that they will become your customers.‍

2. Empowers Advocacy:

These are the loyal customers who recommend and advertise your brand for free. In this digital era, a brand is no longer what companies showcase to people, but instead, what people convey to other individuals. That’s why these days innovative companies are investing in building communities, not customers. No matter how much technology makes things faster and easier, nothing can beat human interaction — and that is exactly what brand advocates do for a brand.

3. Foster brand loyalty:

Customers appreciate being part of a community. They feel more connected when they get a place to express their thoughts and opinions. Loyalty is emotional and irrational and leads to customers feeling like they’re part of an exclusive group. This feeling of being special makes them your brand supporter. They contribute to building your brand image by telling other people about your company and their experiences with your brand. This eventually escalates retention and differentiates your brand from your competitors.‍

4. Authentic Information:

Online communities are a new source of authentic information. It provides space for people to put forward their thoughts about your brand in the form of reviews, comments, Q & As that are used as social proofs to attract new customers. For all the customers, reviews are the most valuable factor to judge a brand before making a purchase.

‍Top 5 Tips for Building a Stronger Brand Community

So finally here are the top 5 tips that can help towards building an online community around your brand.‍

1. Determine the Purpose and Goal:

Everything starts with a purpose. Communities generally aren’t self-emergent; they need a kind of catalyst to get them going. So, before building a community it’s significant to know what you want your community to achieve. Do you just want people to be able to ask questions? Or do you actually want them to be able to answer the questions of other customers as well in order to make everyone in the community communicate with one another? Or, In order to provide a rock-solid foundation for a brand community, the purpose and goal of a community should be well established. Establishing a goal around your brand community gives an impetus in the form of a purpose to the community and a reason to join and participate.

2. Listen to your Community Members:

Listening to your community members is the foundation of community development as it builds trust and relationships, helps to collect genuine feedback, uncovers issues and encourages people to come together. Also, When something does go wrong, one just needs to reach out personally to show vocal or disgruntled users that the admin does care, and is listening to and working to solve the problem.

3. Be responsive / Maintain Consistency in Engagement:

Members’ engagement and participation is a key to making a community successful. You have to find different ways to make this happen. Like — You can motivate members to put forth their opinions about your brand or services or can listen to their thoughts on your recent developments. You just need to make your members feel that the brand is attentive and listening to all the members to instil a sense of belonging. For that, you can reply to their questions, suggestions, or opinions to keep them motivated to contribute to the community. Be authentic and creative. Listen to the concerns of the community and then talk about issues that matter to them.

4. Create clear community guidelines:

Rules are a set of guidelines that are created in communities and are followed by all as a standard. It is essential for an admin to define how he expects members to behave in the community. If you develop rules and norms ahead of time this will minimize the chances of inappropriate activities. People must feel that they are a part of a sensible group where they can impart their knowledge and can share their opinions without being suppressed. If someone posts something that is irrelevant or objectionable then they can be penalized by the admin or moderator as per the guidelines. Adequate and justified rules are important for improving community engagement and keeping community members happy. Basically, rules bind the members to respect each other’s opinions and maintain decorum within the community for it to thrive.

5. Choose the right community platform:

Before you can start reaping the benefits of having your own community, you must choose the right online community platform for your business. Choosing the right platform is not a herculean task. To do so, you should begin by setting clear goals of what you want to achieve so you can find a platform that meets your needs. There are various options available on the internet Like- Facebook, Circle, UUKI, Tribe etc. By choosing the best online community platform for your brand, you can gain insight into your customer’s perspectives and concerns, find a way to serve them better and drive your business in the right direction.

Conclusion:

Gone are the days when branding was done only by informing potential customers about the product or services. Nowadays branding is done by actively engaging your customers in the process of branding. Making them feel important and being valued are the key aspects that one needs to keep in mind while going to build a branding community. We hope this will assist you in creating your own online branding community for your brand to grow by leaps and bounds.

Happy branding!

UUKI

How to Get Your Community Indexed on Google Faster

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 12:55:33 +0000

Originally published by UUKI blogs

How to Get Your Community Indexed on Google Faster

Where there’s traffic, there’s hope.

Google as we all know is a great tool for getting noticed online and certainly, when it comes to traffic, no one hates to have it organically. And communities can be a great source of it provided that we use them sensibly. Some people find it underrated as they don’t know its potential. On the other hand, some of them are making the most out of it. They produce a decent amount of pageviews each month from Google. Renowned platforms like Quora and Reddit are perfect examples.

Let us clear the air regarding one of the wrong notions or perhaps misconception that states “in order to get indexed on Google, a community needs millions of members”, well that is not true. For your community, blogs, pages and other online content to be visible in Google’s search engine results, it just needs to meet the search engine’s requirements.

When people use the search engine to look for content, Google turns to its index to provide relevant content. In this article, we will acquaint you with a few effective tips that will help you index your community faster on Google.

Google’s indexing process in a nutshell
Before we dive into the dynamics of getting your community indexed, let’s go over a simplified explanation of how Google’s indexing process works.

Search engines like Google, use crawlers, (also called bots/spiders) to crawl web pages and collect all information they find on the internet related to the searcher’s query. When a person searches for any query, the crawler starts searching from prominent pages and follows internal links to pages within that site as well as external links to pages on other sites.

‍Every time crawlers detect new content and pages; they store the information in an index. This index is nothing but an enormous database containing all the information of web pages available on the Internet that a search engine looks through.

Search engines look over and fetch content from their index when searchers enter a query, search engines like Google rank web pages based on an algorithm. They assign scores based on various ranking factors like- speed, keyword usage, and backlinks, before ranking the pages.

How long does it take to index a community?

There’s no ensured time span for how long exactly it takes for Google to index sites and new pages. It can take anywhere from hours to weeks to months. It’s completely out of your hands, yet there are a couple of measures you can take to speed up the process of indexing your community.

** Here’s a list of measures to try in order to get your community indexed on Google faster:**

1. Add community Sitemap:

Search engines like to view sitemaps. It is basically a detailed blueprint of your community or website. It helps search engine bots to easily crawl different pages of your community, read content and contribute in evaluating the page ranking. It also includes information like when the page was last updated and the priority of the page.

The pages within the directory are listed in a logical hierarchical order, where the most relevant pages will be placed at the top of the list, and vice & versa. If the bots are not able to crawl the site, it will not get indexed, and the community will not be ranked on search engine result pages. As a result of this, the community will not get search visibility and expected traffic as well. Certainly, it’s easier to increase traffic to the community if people can find it quickly.

2. Set up Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmasters), is a tool which provides you with in-depth information about your site with regard to how it appears on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It offers insight on how a website is doing in organic search as well as ways to make adjustments to the site in the Google index.

It also reports when Googlebot has any issues crawling and indexing your site, so you can fix them. You should also create and submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.

3. Set up Google Analytics

How do you know what steps you take up are beneficial if you don’t measure the outcomes?

Here Google Analytics comes in — It is a mighty tool that gives you a clear insight into how visitors use your site, what sources they are coming from, and how you can get them to the website. When you receive traffic to your community, Google Analytics can act as yet another source of the signal that your community is active.

4. Build high-quality backlinks

People view link building, as an SEO tool to increase ranking, but it’s also a good way to get your site indexed faster. Backlinks (also known as inbound links) are the incoming links that refer from other pages on the web to your own web pages. These are considered as votes by search engine crawlers.

‍The more links that point to your community, the more weightage your community will have in search results. A positive inbound link from one or various authoritative websites gets the attention of Google algorithms. Google sees pages with high-quality links as more important, they’re likely to crawl — and re-crawl — such pages faster than those without. That ultimately leads to faster indexing.

Successful backlinking takes time, but it is well worth it.

5. Check for no-index tag:

Even after following the above steps, if your community still isn’t indexed, your pages may have a noindex tag.

“Noindex” is a meta tag that can be added to the HTML code of a web page, which instructs Google crawlers not to index a specific page to ensure it doesn’t show up in SERPs.

Typically, people use this “noindex” directive to prevent content from being indexed that is not intended for search engines.

Issues occur if the tag is placed incorrectly. The accidental inclusion of a “no-index” tag or directive on a valuable page can cause issues in indexing.

You can check if your valuable community pages have the no-index tag. If yes, just remove the tag and wait for the result.

Conclusion

Having an online presence is great, but only if you are seen. The best way to have users find you is to be indexed by Google so that you can start ranking well.

Recapitulating here that ultimately, the search engines would consider fine, distinctive and latest content for the indexing of the pages. You need to assure that your community should convey pertinent information and enriches your audiences.

UUKI

How to build an online community

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 12:44:00 +0000

Originally published by UUKI blogs

How to build an online community

‍‘Community’ is the new buzzword in the online market. But what exactly is the word community, and why does it matter? The simplest way to differentiate an audience from a community is. Audience can be one too many whereas Community can be many too many

Typical audiences that include social media followings, podcast listenership, blog readers and newsletter subscribers. If we talk about content creators they typically push out content, which is then further consumed by their larger audience. Thinking of it as a one-way street.

Community however, on the other hand, facilitates or creates spaces where audience members can connect, and interact and create value for one another. Some examples for the same include forums, or Slack groups, and Facebook groups, or Discord servers, and live events/conferences. In these examples mentioned,, even when the founder is not present or creating content, the community can exist and continue to thrive on its own.

What’s seldom discussed is the middle ground between these two things however it’s an audience that has a strong sense of community.

You may not be ready to launch a dedicated community, but anyone with an audience should or will care about cultivating an engaged community of true fans.

‍More about what a community is truly

A community allows your audience members to feel part of something bigger than themselves. Your audience members may feel connected with one another. They will buy into your vision on a deeper, and emotional level. They shall vocally support and champion your projects and products. They will defend you from haters and trolls.

Community is truly powerful, and also matters more than ever.

An online community is a collective group of individuals who connect through digital platforms in order to communicate with one another.Publishers, creators, and business owners create communities so their audiences can communicate with them, and also each other, more directly.

Virtual groups are usually organised around Shared interests, Common goals, Collective experiences, or local initiatives. Social media platforms alike Twitter and Facebook are online communities in their own ways.

However, because they are so open to the public and contain such a broad mix of content, people will often make their way to different niche groups where they can then make specific connections, such as connecting with a favourite writer or participating in a communal challenge.

Online communities come in all forms. In terms of the membership types, these three are the most popular, Open to the public, Private with an application for membership, Invite-only.

Any of the above models can be either free or paid.

Communities exist as evergreen perpetual groups or time-based ones that expire and dissolve once they have served their purpose.

‍Pros and cons of a community

First, when you try to grow a community, each member sees the possibility of having a bigger impact. They have an increased sense of efficacy. The level of participation also increases. Everyone wants to be a part of a growing community.

The second school of thought is that growth is bad for a community. The problem is also two-fold. Growing too quickly is also bad. The more the members there are in a community, the less familiar you are with each. The community’s unique identity also begins to dissipate. The recognition, familiarity, tone, references to the previous discussions/activities decline. Everything that attracts the new members can vanish quite quickly.

Growing too big without any planning for it causes problems. These are the problems like information overload, declining attention for each member, inability to recruit volunteers to keep undertaking all the necessary community tasks. Over time, the community becomes a number game. Hiring {x} moderators to handle {x} comments per day.

However, a community that fails to attract new members enters a death spiral. More members leave than can be recruited. Less the activity begets less activity.

The solution is not to treat growth as a standalone activity. It’s a very delicate balancing act. You can juggle an increase in growth with sustaining both activity and a strong sense of community.

If you’re going to plan to recruit members, you need to target them as a group too. You need to plan out the first few weeks in the community, you need to have a plan to integrate the group with existing community members (interviews, welcome discussions, newcomer orientation, community culture documents, rituals/traditions etc…).

You need to protect existing members. Ensure that the level of familiarity doesn’t drop randomly, facilitate sub-groups for members based upon more distinct interests.

UUKI

The 5 Best Online Community Management Courses

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 12:39:00 +0000

Originally published by UUKI blogs

The 5 Best Online Community Management Courses

A community manager helps build, grow and manage a company’s or brand’s online communities. As a community manager, you need to be quick and efficient in responding to the people in the group.

When conflicts arise, it’s important to listen to your community. To ensure the safety of members, you should also remove content that could be harmful to your community.

For any business, an online community can add great value to the company. Online communities can both humanize a brand and make customers feel valued through experiences or direct communication.

Contents

Top 5 platforms for online community management courses.
Why is community management important?
Conclusion

Let’s list some of the best online community management courses below.

1. Coursera

Coursera is the global online learning platform that offers anyone, anywhere access to online courses and degrees from world-class universities and companies. It builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses.

It provides you courses that are highly respected industry certifications, produced in partnership with some of the top organizations in the world.

After completing courses, you can also get certification from Facebook to become a certified community manager. Isn’t that so cool?

2. SkillShare

SkillShare is a virtual learning software that allows users to connect and improve their required skills.

It offers the perfect balance of specific skill development and aspirational learnings. SkillShare has in-depth content that is organized into easy-to-follow lessons.

You can begin with the free membership and start with introductory courses or dive into the paid membership for more categories and detailed course outlines.

3. Udemy

Udemy provides access to thousands of courses produced by independent instructors to millions of students. Udemy courses are typically well-organized, informative, and not very costly, especially if you wait for Udemy to offer one of their frequent sales where top courses drop from $100+ to below $15.

Udemy was founded in 2007 it has grown to one of the largest learning platforms around and now offers more than 130,000 courses and has helped more than 30 million learners.

Build an Engaged Online Community is a beginner-level yet comprehensive course by Phil Ebiner on community management. This course covers building, engaging, and growing your communities.

4. Feverbee

Feverbee is an online community consultancy that provides advice, insights, and training to businesses for building better communities. Moreover, it offers multiple online courses on its website.

This platform has trained over 1250+ community professionals through its online community management academy.

More than a thousand community managers have enrolled in Feverbee courses.

5. LinkedIn learning

LinkedIn has now started its learning platform where you can opt for different courses online. In June 2020, Microsoft made 14 learning paths on LinkedIn Learning available for free.

Many of the courses offered here can help you earn certifications that can help you stand out from other applicants. Applicants with LinkedIn Learning certificates have a 9% higher chance of getting hired compared to those that don’t.

LinkedIn Learning is a better learning platform because it provides higher quality at a lower price. For just $29.99 per month, you can get unlimited access to all of its courses.

Why is community management important?
Community management is all about building and maintaining relationships and presenting your brand in the best possible light. It requires your brand to practice social listening.

Customer feedback is one of the separation points between a social media manager and a community manager.

The true sense of an online community takes social media to the next level and opens up a world known as a social business.

Conclusion

The role of a community manager is to act as the bridge between a brand and the community it is aiming to create. They should be the brand’s ambassador, engaging with potential customers and building relationships with existing ones. And now, you can become an online community manager by easily opting for the courses from the platforms listed above.

With online classes, you don’t need to move to a different city or commute long distances in order to learn a course of your choice. These days, people can opt for online courses and even get a certification in the comfort of their homes.

Best of luck! 😊

> U‍UKI

Differences between social media manager and community manager

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 12:27:00 +0000

Originally published by UUKI blogs

Running a brand’s social media account is a lot of work. You’re not only simultaneously asked to support customers but also the market the product & create designs one in a while. As the social media industry has evolved over time, each role in the marketing team has developed along with it.

Social media management in a mid-sized company is no longer one person. Typically, most companies find they need at least a social media manager as well as a community manager. When expanding one’s social media team, it is kept in mind that these two roles are often the first to be divided up, so it’s important to understand what the differences are. Figuring out which areas need to be covered is also up to one’s company’s priorities.

What are the major differences?

A social media manager will generally post as the brand’s account on social networks. They’re the main voice of the brand and are responsible for posts, replies and also general content.

As the brand, the social media manager keenly makes sure to post according to a voice and social strategy. Often, they’re speaking directly to the people who are already familiar with the brand.

A social media manager has to be responsible for the brand voice on all of the business’ social media profiles. They are also required to deliver news across platforms, such as the release of new products, new services, and new features. They also have to create content to promote the brand’s products and attract new customers.

For example, the social media managers for the popular Madden series of football video games regularly promotes the annual release of the main product, and along with the addition of new features throughout the year.

In summary a social media manager can work independently or as the head of a particular dedicated team. Depending upon the size of the business, a social media manager may delegate posting responsibilities to other team members. For multiple large organisations, they may focus solely on strategies and analytics.

What is a community manager?

A community manager Is one who connects with the audience on a more personal level by posting in discussions as themselves to encourage engagement among group members. Often they are seen to be as the community’s advocate for the brand. They also encourage discussions that will help improve the product and will often ask for feedback from the core audience.

For example, for the Madden game series’ community manager goes by the username Kraelo. Kraelo is who regularly engages with the community by participating in discussions with fans through social media and forums.

‍1. To summarise, a community manager’s responsibilities are inclusive of:

The goals for a particular community manager are more broad than they are for a social media manager and include increasing awareness or engagement. A community manager looks closely to increase the number of brand mentions, new impressions, and novel community members across platforms.

2. ‍Commonalities between a social media manager and a community manager

The social media managers and the community managers often work together on content strategy and answering user questions. For example, the very unique “ear-to-the-wall” perspective of the community manager may help the social media manager understand what type of content to create.

The social media manager responds to the general inquiries, such as people asking about the release of a product or pricing questions. Technical questions and precise issues are handled by the community manager, who further helps with troubleshooting.

3. Importance of each role

Both positions seem to be crucial to any business looking to build a strong digital following. Although some companies may still rely on one person to manage all of these responsibilities, many have begun to specialise in order to better serve their customers.

Splitting duties into different roles will only allow your business to better connect with audiences. From increasing the number of conversions as a result of better content to creating lifetime customers through community development — both the roles have the potential to transform your business.

U‍UKI

What are the best apps for finding freelance work?

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 11:41:07 +0000

> Written by UUKI Team

1. Upwork

One of the best freelancing sites on the web, Upwork is a great resource for those just starting their freelancing journey.

Upwork has clients that are looking for everything, from business plans to web design to children's book illustrations.

The Freelancer Basic account gets you 10 free connects per month. Each job that you bid on requires anywhere from 1 to 6 connects to be able to submit your proposal.

2. Gigwalk

No matter if you are looking for a few extra bucks spending money, or if you need to earn an entire paycheck, Gigwalk might be just what you need.

Just download the app, register, and link your PayPal, then check out the gigs in your area. Work as little or as much as needed.

3. Rev

Rev is a transcription platform that allows anyone to pick up freelance transcription work anywhere they have a computer and internet access.

You will initially need to pass a competency test, but after that, you will be able to start taking jobs you are comfortable with.

As long as you keep your scores and metrics up, you can advance to the top level of transcriptionists, giving you access to better jobs, higher pay, and the ability to grade other jobs.

4. Peopleperhour

Peopleperhour is one of the top freelancing sites that connects clients to freelancers that are available for them.

They are a bit more strict than other sites, as they require aspiring freelancers to apply to become certified on their site.

5. Fiverr

If you are brand new to freelancing and want to be able to get your foot in the door and land a quick job, Fiverr is a great place to browse.

There are a ton of random jobs available, from logo designs to resume editing to blog writing.

Fiverr is a place where clients go to find affordable workers, so don't expect to make hundreds of dollars right off the bat, but if you have the patience to browse, you are sure to find a rewarding gig.

What are some great websites to get feedback on startup ideas?

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 11:06:00 +0000

Written by UUKI Team

1. Indie Hackers Community

Indie Hackers is a dedicated community for people who are looking to launch startups and grow their businesses, and so it can be a pretty good option if you're looking for insights from your peers, as opposed to from mentors or from your target audience.

Because there are literally thousands of existing discussion threads, you can also take a look at what's out there and join in on the threads that are already popular. For example, at the time of writing, there's a discussion where you can tell people about your product and they'll tell you how they'd market it. If you just go in all guns blazing and asking for validation, you'll probably get ignored.

2. UUKI Community

Check out, the UUKI Community Platform, if you are looking for a futuristic community platform where you can build your audience and scale your business then UUKI is perfect. It's a community platform for Web3 users, community managers, builders, and creators where you can create your own community pages, which gives your audience a destination to actively engage and share ideas with rich text, and media on the UUKI community platform.

3. ProductHunt Community

ProductHunt has a lot in common with IndieHackers, except that their community is a little bit more of an afterthought that plays second fiddle to its database of new products. That's not to say that you can't get any feedback there, but be aware that you might have to wait a little longer before you hear back from people.

On the plus side, the people there have a pretty good idea of what they're talking about, and so even though you might have to wait a while until you get a response, it's worth it. It's also arguably the friendliest and most approachable of the companies on this list.

4. Startup.com Community

The Startup.com Community is designed to help people to surround themselves with people who are in or who have been in a similar position. You can put your heads together with like-minded people and work together to solve problems, or you can simply seek a little validation for an idea that you've had. It is what you make of it.

On the downside, you can't just sign up and start posting here. Instead, you'll need to apply for consideration and hope that you make the cut. This also has a secret upside though, which is that you know that everyone in the community has been pre-vetted.

5. Startup Nation Community

The Startup Nation discussion forums are pretty comprehensive, with subforums including Startup Business Basics, the Gig Economy, Marketing, Sales and Public Relations, Personal Growth, Finance and Funding and more. The chances are that you'll be able to find a discussion thread that ties in with what you want to talk about, but they're also nice and welcoming to people who start discussions of their own.

There's also the fact that the Startup Nation site also shares a bunch of other resources including opinion pieces from their experts, a regular podcast and even a list of meeting opportunities in and around the local area.

6. Subreddits

Reddit is essentially a network of communities within communities in which anyone can create an account and start and comment on different topics, which themselves are categorised into subreddits.

When you're looking for startup validation, Reddit is a free source of feedback, although it can often be harsh and brutally honest. You'll also want to remember that it's a public forum and that you'll be entering existing communities, so you'll need to abide by their rules and guidelines. A few of the most relevant subreddits for you to look into include:

/r/startups
/r/Entrepreneur
/r/BusinessHub
/r/hwstartups
/r/ladybusiness
/r/mutualcollaboration
/r/SideProject
/r/venturecapital

What is an ideal way to find clients in LinkedIn?

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 10:29:58 +0000

_Written by UUKI Team

_LinkedIn is a powerful tool for engaging leads and making sales. With its 750+ million users, LinkedIn helps you connect with clients and generate income.

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile (above the fold)

There are 2 factors to consider when you optimize your LinkedIn page.

First, tailor your profile to your ideal client. The point of LinkedIn is to market yourself as a quality employee. Create a "client persona" and answer the following questions.

What skills are important to my employer? How much experience do they want to see? What keywords will stand out to them?

Secondly, allow your personality to shine on your LinkedIn page. While clients look for certain criteria on your profile, they also want to hire someone who brings something unique to the table.

Do you have past experience that stands out from other candidates? Does your header express yourself? How can you write a professional profile using your own voice? Keep these answers handy as you optimize your profile.

Think through these answers as they will help you accurately represent your brand on your page.

2. Schedule posts

Whether you're time-poor or simply prefer to run your business efficiently, scheduling posts is the way to go.

It's important to do because it allows you to post at various days and times. Once you've done this for a while, you'll discover which days and times get the most engagement and can schedule posts mostly in those slots.

There are plenty of free tools out there for scheduling to social media, and almost all have free plans.

We love Feedhive and Hootsuite, but find the one that works best for you.

These platforms will also give you the analytics you need to determine which posts get the most engagement, so you can craft future content accordingly.

3. Get social on LinkedIn

Once your LinkedIn profile is optimized and daily posts are scheduled, you'll be ready to show off your page and start networking.

There are 2 tactics to keep in mind as you socialize with professionals.

First, share your knowledge about your niche. Write statuses, share articles, and keep your profile up-to-date.
Second, expand your professional bubble. If you stick to one type of client, you'll miss out on other opportunities. With that in mind, take initiative and follow well-known influencers, fellow professionals, and other business owners you can work with.

For example, if you're starting a B2B marketing company and want to implement a blog, it would be beneficial to connect with B2B writers.

What is the best way to grow a community?

Modern Community Platform — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 08:20:00 +0000

Written by UUKI Team

Things like brand loyalty, improved sales, and customer feedback have become the standard of strong online communities. But how do you build a strong online community?

1. Foster Your Community

This is one of the most critical steps to achieve mass uptake. Funnel people towards your community by inviting them by email, promoting it on your blog, mentioning it on social media, or including it on alternative marketing materials or sales packaging.

Entice them with teasers, but be clear about your community visions and goals so they know what to expect and aren’t disappointed when they arrive.

2. Set Out Your Audience

Who will your community service and how will you go about serving them? These are questions you must answer internally before you can expect any major growth. Consider developing a couple of buyer personas to help you figure out the best ways to focus your time and engage your target consumers. It’s so much easier to build strong relationships when knowing who your customers are and what they want.

3. Renounce Control

Sure, you’re the community manager, but the ones who are really in control are the customers and that’s a good thing! Giving up control can be tough, but customers appreciate authentic interaction. Don’t delete negative feedback. Encourage open discussions. Embrace ideas.

The honest feedback you’ll receive in your community will be invaluable to the business. 86% of Fortune 500 companies report communities to provide insight into customer needs, which will help you serve them better in the long run.

4. Customize the Community

Your business is unique, so your community should be too. Cater to your community by acknowledging your user’s uniqueness! The Bump is an online community for new moms and moms-to-be. They have niche groups that encourage conversations from subsets of consumers including everything from “First Time Mamas” to “Formula Feeders Unite.” Consider adding a requests section to your community where customers can provide feedback on products, services, and experiences.

5. Utilize Advocates or Influencers

Connecting with individuals who believe in your brand, product, or service and are willing to spread the word can have some of the most lasting impacts on community growth. According to a Nielsen research study, 92% of consumers trust online word-of-mouth recommendations, while only 33% of them trust online banner ads. Start by seeking out online personalities who are passionate about your industry or brand. Consider ways you can add value to their online reputation as well as yours such as asking them to do a Q&A on your forum. You know your business best, so employ strategies that are right for you!

By building a community where customers feel comfortable speaking their voices, you’ll encourage activity, growth, sales, and limitless feedback. The benefits that come from an engaged, lively community will surpass your business’s biggest expectations.

5 Patreon Alternatives for Monetizing Your Community

Modern Community Platform — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 18:32:00 +0000

originally published by UUKI Blogs

Having a community around your brand is one of the most powerful tools a company can use today. An online community is an online space created by an organization or a brand, where members, customers, and fans alike can get together, ask questions, discuss interests surrounding the brand, and make social connections.
Communities can both humanize a brand and make customers feel valued through experiences or direct communication. They help you interact with each other interested in a particular product of a brand and share their personal experiences with the products. Making sure your online platforms feel safe and enjoyable for all your participants should be the essential long-term goal for your online community.
Communities create a link between customers and real people at the organization. Users with questions can tag fellow members in a discussion or post a question and expect a response from someone in the community. People in the community can feel connected to the brand and each other.
Building online communities come with a lot of benefits plus you can also monetize your community. When you monetize your data, you can figure out the understanding of the customers. You can now use these insights into how best to improve products and services. Moving ahead enhances the customer journey and makes the customer stick to your product.

What is Patreon? (FEATURES AND PRICING)

Patreon is a way to get paid for creating the things you're already creating like webcomics, creating online communities, videos, and songs. Fans pay a few bucks per month or per post you release, and then you get paid every month, or every time you release something new. Most Patreon creators have multiple tiers that supporters can join, with each tier corresponding to a certain monetary amount.

FEATURES
•Flexible pay-outs: Pay yourself whenever you want, or receive monthly auto pay-outs from your creator balance via direct deposit via PayPal.
•Business tools: Track patron payments, lifetime value, and notes to help manage relationships with them directly.
•Direct relationships: Develop relationships with your patrons through patron-only posts, messages, or directly via email.

PRICING

Lite provides you with simple tools to set up recurring support from your fans and run a membership business.
Pro is for creators who want to build a robust, thriving membership business.

Premium is for established creators and creative businesses looking for a higher level of service and advanced features.

Top 5 Patreon Alternatives

1. SubscribeStar

SubscribeStar is a digital content monetization platform that provides content creators with a means of getting a steady income. SubscribeStar makes it easy for your subscribers to message you. It allows creators to upload exclusive content and sell memberships for access.

FEATURES
•Independent: Flexible and attentive to your needs. No micromanagement, overreactions, or judgments.
•Safe to use: All your content and data are protected.
•Transparent: Comprehensive statistics and analysis. Easy to understand the fee structure and pricing policies.

PRICING

SubscribeStar only offers a single plan. SubscribeStar is one of the best alternatives to Patreon, as all creators get access to all features for one price.

2. Ko-fi

The perk point about Ko-fi is that it doesn’t take a cut of your donations and we don’t charge supporters extra either. Over 51,396 creators earned money on Ko-fi last month!

FEATURES
•Easy messaging: Creators and Supporters can now send messages to each other directly on Ko-fi.
•Upgrade your membership tiers: You can now automatically upgrade existing monthly supporters to a tier of membership.
•Get payment alerts: Get messages in your Stream Chat whenever you receive a payment on Ko-fi!

PRICING

Ko-fi is a friendly way to earn an income. Start with a free tip jar for what you’re already creating and offer supporters more whenever you like!

3. Buy me a coffee

This platform is for online content creators to receive tips and donations to support their work. Buy Me A Coffee focuses on offering a simple way for supporters to donate or make a purchase with less commitment, unlike Patreon.

Buy me a coffee does not provide membership tiers but works more like a standard donation box than a membership subscription.
Each coffee received is not actual coffee! But is the money obviously 💰. Each coffee received can only be $3, $4, or $5.

4.Memberful

Memberful was founded in 2013. Memberful helps independent publishers, educators, and creators sell memberships to their audience and build sustainable businesses.

FEATURES

PRICING

Memberful charges a flat transaction fee of 10% on the Starter plan and 4.9% on the Pro and Premium plans. You own your content, your website, and your brand. Memberful keeps your customers on your site, providing an integrated checkout and account management experience.

5. Bountysource

Bountysource is the funding platform for open-source software and is a Crowdfunding service in the development category. Users can improve the open-source projects they love by creating/collecting bounties and pledging to fundraisers.

PRICING
Bountysource charges a 10% fee on all withdrawals from your Bountysource account. This includes any money earned from Bounties, Fundraisers, or Donations.

Conclusion
All these platforms are unique in their ways. Patreon and others charge creators a platform fee, typically 5–12% of the funds received by the creator. Whereas, some platforms do not charge you any fee.
You can always create a funding goal and share your progress with your audience, fill your Gallery with your best work and write posts to update your fans.
Good luck! 📈

UUKI Blogs

The 5 Best Online Community Management Courses

Modern Community Platform — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 17:35:00 +0000

Originally published by UUKI Blogs

A community manager helps build, grow and manage a company's or brand's online communities. As a community manager, you need to be quick and efficient in responding to the people in the group.

When conflicts arise, it’s important to listen to your community. To ensure the safety of members, you should also remove content that could be harmful to your community.

For any business, an online community can add great value to the company. Online communities can both humanize a brand and make customers feel valued through experiences or direct communication.

_Contents

Top 5 platforms for online community management courses.
Why is community management important?
Conclusion _

Let’s list some of the best online community management courses below.

1. Coursera

It provides you courses are highly respected industry certifications, produced in partnership with some of the top organizations in the world.

After completing courses, you can also get certification from Facebook to become a certified community manager. Isn’t that so cool?

2. SkillShare

SkillShare is a virtual learning software that allows users to connect and improve their required skills.

It offers the perfect balance of specific skill development and aspirational learnings. SkillShare has in-depth content that is organized into easy-to-follow lessons.

You can begin with the free membership and start with introductory courses or dive into the paid membership for more categories and detailed course outlines.

3. Udemy

Udemy was founded in 2007 it has grown to one of the largest learning platforms around and now offers more than 130,000 courses and has helped more than 30 million learners.

Build an Engaged Online Community is a beginner-level yet comprehensive course by Phil Ebiner on community management. This course covers building, engaging, and growing your communities.

4. Feverbee

Feverbee is an online community consultancy that provides advice, insights, and training to businesses for building better communities. Moreover, it offers multiple online courses on its website.

This platform has trained over 1250+ community professionals through its online community management academy.

More than a thousand community managers have enrolled in Feverbee courses.

*5. LinkedIn Learning *

LinkedIn has now started its learning platform where you can opt for different courses online. In June 2020, Microsoft made 14 learning paths on LinkedIn Learning available for free.

LinkedIn Learning is a better learning platform because it provides higher quality at a lower price. For just $29.99 per month, you can get unlimited access to all of its courses.

Customer feedback is one of the separation points between a social media manager and a community manager.

The true sense of an online community takes social media to the next level and opens up a world known as a social business.

Conclusion

The role of a community manager is to act as the bridge between a brand and the community it is aiming to create.
They should be the brand's ambassador, engaging with potential customers and building relationships with existing ones. And now, you can become an online community manager by easily opting for the courses from the platforms listed above.

UUKI

How to Convert Blog Posts into Social Media Content

Modern Community Platform — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 12:45:00 +0000

> Written by UUKI Team

Turning your blog posts into social media content has its benefits. First of all, by converting your articles into shorter social media updates you’ll successfully merge your blog and social media content. With that, you form the bigger picture of your content strategy instead of separating social media and blog posts without a single touching point.

Having social media content that comes from your blog content can also help you to bring more traffic to your website. You can easily insert a link in your social media posts to invite people to read more or mention something that can only be found in the blog post.

On the plus side, converting blog posts into social media content can inspire you to create new content for social media, which is excellent news for every social media marketer. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with new blog post ideas but, from one blog post alone, you can develop several social media posts ideas.

1. Adding Quote to an Image

Quotes are one of the best ways to connect with your followers on social media. They're extremely popular content because they're a digestible, relevant, and highly-shareable content.

From each blog post, gather the most valuable nuggets of information and quotes. If your article also includes statistics, statements, or quotes from influencers in the niche, they're perfect to go along with your social media post.

2. Turn Blog Posts into Short Videos

Video is the biggest type of content on social media right now, and this will not change in the future either. As a matter of fact, video content will take over up to 80% of the entire internet traffic by 2020.

Video content is getting a lot of traction and engagement on social media, and you need to use that to your advantage by converting blog posts into videos for social media platforms. You can outline the same information in your video too, but remember to keep it shorter than the time it takes to read the blog post.

3. Start Live Discussions about the Topic

Have a popular blog post that sparked numerous questions and comments?

Good, then you can take things up a notch by starting a live discussion on about the topic in order to answer additional questions and acquire even more traffic and engagement for your article.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have the live video option available, and followers always love it when they can participate in a live broadcast, Q&A, or a discussion that is happening is happening in real-time in front of them.

4. Use Instagram for Multi-Step Visual Storytelling

If you can tell a lot about a blog post with one image and a snippet, imagine how much you can tell with 10 images? You can use Instagram's multi-image option to tell the story from your article and provide an entire step-by-step preview without linking back to the original blog post.

5. Conduct Polls on the Blog Post Topic

Polls are an excellent way to develop a discussion about your blog topic and convince your followers to participate. In fact, they can increase your web traffic by up to 20%.

Twitter is the ideal platform for polls if you want to learn more about what your followers think about the article, the story, or just to collect some data for your future blog posts.