Communities should go beyond the product

It is crucial to understand that communities can provide more benefits than just product related contents, such as software updates and tutorials. Communities have the power to bring people together in a place that facilitates engagement with one another, enabling them to share their experiences and learn from one another. In this way, communities create value for its members by bridging the gap between customers and businesses through interactions both online and offline.

Communities are also used as a tool for engagement when they are able to facilitate communication between users within a platform or website; thus creating an avenue for communication between customers who would otherwise not have met each other without this medium of interaction.

Going beyond the product means creating value

Going beyond the product means creating value for your community. Communities are one of the most powerful ways to create true loyalty, because it's not about selling them a product or service—it's about giving them an experience that is valuable to them.

In fact, community members are often willing to spend more money on products since they've become familiar with the brand and believe in its mission. This is especially true if you have created a strong sense of identity within your community, as users will feel like part of something larger than themselves when they join up with other users who share similar interests and values.

What kind of value can a community create?

The concept of community is probably familiar to you. It's that group of people who share a common interest, and come together to learn, support one another and have fun with their shared interests. Communities can be formed around any topic or interest—from video games to gardening.

Community members don't just talk about their interests online; they also get together in person to share knowledge and experiences in real life. If a community is based around an activity or hobby, members will likely organize meet-ups so they can work on projects together in person as well as online.

What kind of value can communities create? We've seen communities provide support through forums where people can ask questions about their projects and receive answers from other members who have experience with it (or might be able to help).

Communities also share knowledge by posting tutorials for other members' reference when they're trying something new themselves: "How do I set up my new camera?" "Is this edible?" etc...

How to build a community that goes beyond the product

To build a community that goes beyond the product, you need to take a few steps. Here are some tips:

• Be a good listener. Listen to what members of your community say and listen for issues they're facing, especially if they're frequent or recurring. These can be great indicators of opportunities for feature improvements or new products down the line.

• Provide value to community members by offering educational content that's relevant to their needs and interests, like webinars and videos on best practices in certain areas like marketing automation or growth hacking strategies. Community members will appreciate this kind of content because it helps them do their jobs more effectively, which makes them happier about being part of your company's community—and thus more likely to stick around when times get tough (because all companies go through rough patches from time-to-time).

• Build trust with the community by being transparent about changes that affect users' experience with your product without giving away confidential information such as numbers related specifically.

Great Community Example

Framer is a no-code tool that you can design and publish beautiful websites easily. What makes them even unique is their community. You can ask anything related to product, you can share your websites and ask for a feedback or you can just hire framer web builder. Check out their Discord community

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it’s all about value. A community will have to create a lot of value for a company before it can justify its existence as a separate entity. It has to be something that benefits both sides—like we saw with Slack and Atlassian earlier in this post. For companies who want to build their own communities, this means making sure that your members are getting enough from your platform so that they feel like it’s worth their time and energy.

Since I have been trying to observe communities, I realized that I am not really fan of them that only speaks around the product itself. Finding the posted-QAs, asking for help or other “customer support” functions are okay but what communities can give you permanents besides momentaries?

I am not even talking about the ones that is just publishing their new blog posts or casual open positions.

Creating a space to let your customers engange each other is the starting point for sure, but what is next? Providing useful sources that you only share via community? A channel for people who is looking for a job or hire? Or a promotion channel people sharing their producthunt launch? No matter but the simple is “providing a benefit addition to product usage” If your users can set up a call for gathering a feedback to his/her personal blog via your community or etc, you are the best.