7 Steps To Building An Online Community (With Examples)

Whether you are an online course builder, eCommerce store owner, B2B business or Fortune 500 company, learning how to build an online community is invaluable.

Among the many benefits, online communities can drive traffic to your website, strengthen your relationship with customers, and increase your company’s sales.

Reading: How to create a community based website

In this article, you’ll learn exactly how to create an online community in 7 actionable steps – backed by real-world examples of successful community leaders, entrepreneurs, and online course creators who have made their own strong engaged communities. Let’s get started!

Skip here:

• What is an online community
• Why build an online community
• General Types of Online Communities
• Learning Communities
• Branded Communities
• 7 Steps to Building an Online Community
  • Define Your community purpose and goals
  • Create community policies and rules
  • Choose a community hosting platform
  • Identify community stakeholders
  • Set up a community
  • How to build communities with engagement
  • Grow your online community
• Conclusion

Our community is a crucial part of our membership. It’s a well-known saying that members come for the content but stay for the community. Our entire team is present there as they understand the importance of actually appearing and interacting with our members.Mike Morrison, The Membership Guys

What is an online community?

Put simply, an online community is a shared space where members interact with each other. Typically, online communities are built around members’ common interests, opinions, or goals.

The type of community you build depends on your business goals. A community for a fitness coach can look like a private Facebook group where members of their fitness program can share knowledge and transformational stories. For a photographer, it can be an open forum for thousands of members to gather, share resources, and provide feedback on others’ photography.

Whatever your platform of choice, online communities are a powerful way to create meaningful connections between your followers, as they allow your audience to:

• Discuss topics, that interest them
• connect with a brand, an online instructor, or another leader
• study together
• collaborate on personal projects or course goals
• Exchange Advice and Related News

Why build an online community?

As a business owner, online communities bring your audience or students together in a single place where you can ask questions, monitor their progress and get helpful feedback.

For brands like Thinkific, an online community is a way to bring our current and potential customers together in one place to share ideas, Strategies to discuss and actionable ones s feedback on our product.

Benefits of online communities

Regardless of your team size, there are many common benefits of creating an online community:

• Be recognized as a leader in your field. Expand your sphere of influence by expanding your network and audience.
• Create brand ambassadors. Increase your influence Get referrals to your business from brand evangelists.
• Feedback from your audience. By engaging in regular dialogue with your community, you can improve your products and services and serve them better.
• Increase sales. A community helps encourage more engaged followers and increase retention, which can ultimately increase sales.
• Respond to market changes. Digital communities help you maintain touchpoints with your audience when it’s not possible to be in the same physical space.
• Online communities are a natural fit for digital entrepreneurs. Second, Thinkific’s most successful course builders didn’t start courses on day one. They began creating niche professional learning communities on Facebook.

Kate Baker started a group called The Veterinary Cytology Coffeehouse for veterinary professionals interested in learning more about veterinary cytology and hematology. In the first year, the group grew to 35,000 members without advertising. Today it has over 67,000 members. But she didn’t start her group hoping to make money—it was only after her group members began asking for courses and more information that she made the leap.

Similarly, Latrina Walden replicated her course the start of a successful study group for nurses. After hosting several live Q&As, she received an overwhelmingly positive response. Group members asked for more materials, which prompted them to start selling online courses.

These two entrepreneurs eventually founded online learning communities, ultimately giving them the impetus and validation they needed to go online -Create courses.

Do you feel that an online community could be your future? In addition to the many different platforms that can host communities, there are also different types of communities, each of which can affect how your community functions. Let’s take a closer look at both.

Related: It’s Time to Tap Into Into Into Togetherness with Communities

Common Types of Online Communities

Of the many different types of online communities, we’ve singled out the six that we think you’ll encounter most often. You are:

1. Interest. A group brought together by a common interest or passion, such as Thinkific’s Facebook group for creating online Courses.
2. Action. Communities coming together to bring about change. For example, Black Lives Matter activists form a group to plan rallies.
3. Location. communities within geographic boundaries. For example, a Facebook group focused on things to do while visiting Vancouver, Canada.
4. Practice versus Profession. Also known as a community of practice, this is when members of a particular profession come together to share professional development tips and learn how to excel at their job. For example, teachers forming a group to expand their professional knowledge.
5. Learning. These are communities focused on common learning goals. These goals can be related to a job, but also to a hobby or a non-professional goal, such as B. learning to roller skate.
6. Brand. Communities centered around a common mission, goal, or lifestyle that a company or brand is committed to.

Of these six different types of communities, learning communities and branded communities are the most useful for course creators.

What is a learning community?

A learning community is a group of people with similar learning goals who meet to discuss course topics and assignments. Online learning communities complement online courses as they enable social learning, peer-to-peer support, and student-to-teacher support. They also help with accountability as students can be paired or cohorts to hold each other accountable for learning goals.

Tiffany Aliche’s online community is a great example of a learning community in action . She has built a hugely successful online membership community teaching women about personal finance. Members of her community often join her online program and log on to share insights and progress toward financial independence.

Other examples of learning communities include:

• Kate Baker, an online community creator, became a course creator after starting a Facebook group for veterinarians.
• The Zealous Art Community, founded by Freda Lombard to promote her Zealous art Promote and support art courses.
• Latrina Walden, a former nurse who started a community to help nurses prepare for exams before expanding into online courses.
• Dana Malstaff, who founded Boss Mom, provides resources, community and guidance for entrepreneurial moms.

Why build a learning community?

Many of our top course builders can attest that learning communities improve student outcomes, including edible retention, test scores and graduation rates. They also improve course creator results because happy and engaged students stay longer, refer friends, and buy more courses.

Benefits of Learning Communities

Go to the Key benefits of learning communities include:

• Social Education: Communities allow students to learn by teaching others and asking questions.
• Quicker Answers: Communities answer questions faster without relying on an instructor for an answer.
• Course Creation Ideas: Our top course creators hear each other constantly responding to what questions people are asking or what challenges they are facing. They use this information to anticipate their students’ needs and develop more courseware or other offerings.
• Cohort-Based Learning: Cohort-based learning gives learners the sense of community they desire to improve learning outcomes. Members benefit from a supportive network and more accountability.

Related: Learn how Thinkific Communities can create new opportunities for your business

What is a brand community?

A brand community Community is a group of customers, partners, and employees—brought together in one place to support one another, provide input, and ultimately build deeper emotional connections with a brand.

This type of community can be owned by a company be hosted on its own website or in a group on Facebook, but it is not limited to one or the other.

Our branded community was built to bring Thinkific, our customers and experts together in one place – about our platform and the success of our users. (In the next section, we will provide some concrete examples of how our community creates value for all stakeholders involved.)

Another example of a branded community is Brit + Co’s creative community. It is based on Thinkific and was developed to complement the online course and membership site. In their community, students can share inspiration, ideas, achievements and their journeys in the creative field.

Why build a brand community?

Whether supporting your customers or testing product ideas, the concept of online communities has gone well beyond a social media strategy.

Brand communities are not just changing the company’s marketing strategy. Companies report an overall deeper insight into customer needs and product designs. Branded communities benefit businesses because members buy more, stay loyal, and reduce marketing costs through grassroots evangelism.

Benefits of branded communities

Some of the Many benefits brands see from their communities include:

• Communicate Directly with Customers – Brands have another way to communicate with customers for sales and customer service requests
• Product Feedback – Brand communities create a forum to test ideas and get feedback from their core customer base before making product decisions.
• Customer Acquisition – Communities can attract new customers and build trust, help with conversion
• Customers support customers – Customers can help each other with questions, and as a result, the burden of support does not rest solely on your shoulders
• Loyalty – a strong product or a star ke service only takes you so far, brand loyalty often comes from a strong active community
• Customer loyalty – better support and a better customer experience lead to better customer loyalty

To illustrate the value of creating a brand community, we share some key benefits and examples from our own brand community.

1. Motivation and reinforcement

Imagine how powerful it would be if your users could support other users, motivate each other and share success stories.

In In our brand community, we celebrate wins and share best practices to ensure when one member of the group wins, we all win.

1. Product Feedback and Feature Requests

It is It’s easy for brands to miss-brand their communities by confining their stakeholders (moderators and admins) to internal marketing or support teams.

Thinkific’s brand community has been a significant source of product ideas and feedback. Some of our integrations, like our association with Constant Contact, can be attributed to insights from our group.

When we see pain points and feature requests, we can hear their side of the story and see how their idea of of the community. When dozens of people comment on this, that’s a pretty telling sign. And since all content is archived, we can get even more context by using the group search feature to see how often this feature is requested was.

1. Announcements and soft launches

An online community is an incredibly effective way to make product announcements, as it allows you to generate discussion and engagement in a more meaningful way than email can. In Peter’s case, he had to tap into our community of dedicated course creators to test a new feature.

1. Content Ideas

Another benefit of our community is our ability to scan the discussion for knowledge gaps find and fill them. When many people are asking the same questions, we need to educate them better through our content.

It’s questions like Monica’s that inspire us to create posts like this: how to create a landing page and examples of landing pages.

7 Steps to Building an Online Community

Now that we understand the difference between learning communities and branded communities and their benefits, let’s go the 7 essential steps through steps to building a successful online community:

1. Define the purpose and goals of your community

While a community may have multiple goals, it is best to focus on a small number of goals that represent value being created for you and your community and adhere to specific behaviors and results may be tied.

You also want some tangible metrics called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure how successful you are at meeting your goals.

Understand the value of the community

To understand how to build a community, it is important to understand what actually creates a sense of community and how members get value.

Long before it was online -Communities gave, community psychologists described four timeless factors that define a sense of community. They are:

1. Membership: A sense of belonging and identification, alignment with other community members with similar goals and interests.
2. Influence: Members of a community should feel empowered to have an impact on what a group does (otherwise there is no motivation to participate), and group cohesion depends on the group having some influence over theirs has members.
3. Integration and meeting needs: Beyond member status, members should feel rewarded for their participation and derive value from being part of the group.
4. Shared Emotional Connection: A shared emotional connection, cited as the critical element to true community, comes about through high-value interactions and bonds that are created. Your emotional connection to a community can be increased through recognition within the community and will be decreased if you are ashamed in front of the community.

This is helpful to understand as it ticks the boxes you need to tick to create a valuable community for your members.

Balance value with behavior

A community-based brand builds loyalty, it doesn’t not by increasing revenue transactions, but by helping people meet their needs.

Next, you must find ways to translate that community value into specific behaviors that create that value.

Here is a key example of values ​​and corresponding behaviors for learning communities and brand communities:

ValueHow value is createdBehaviour that creates valuelearning community(1) connecting and discussing with peers and trainers who support learning(1) asking questions and Ant Receive words from students and educators (2) Students analyze scenarios and apply knowledge (2) Discuss solutions to questions posed by educators and peers Brand community(1) Improved customer support and retention(1) Customers can ask questions and Share success stories, with feedback from other customers and the brand.(2) Product innovation(2) Product stakeholders participate in a beta Community testing to get valuable feedback that guides product design(3) Brand loyalty(3) Brand community Members earn points for creating community value that unlocks bonuses and discounts.

Community KPIs

Performance metrics are used to measure your Measure progress against a goal. They should be SMART: specific, measurable, realistic, and time-bound.

See also: How to Create a Business Website 

While your KPIs will vary based on the purpose of your community and the platform you use, a few KPIs are universal.

Community KPIs to consider

User growth

• Total number of users
• New users in the past month
• Migrated (lost) users in the last month
• New user growth (month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year)

User engagement

• How many Total interactions (likes/comments)
  • How many members posted comments?
  • How many likes were there?
• What percentage of all users liked or commented in a month?
• What % of all users were inactive?

You should keep an eye on these KPIs and check regularly. You can get the best insights by comparing these metrics to the previous period, for example:

• User growth year-on-year
• New users last month compared to the previous month

While user engagement and growth are great, you need some KPIs that align with your business goals.

If you’re a creator of online courses, you’re more interested in how many courses people are buying or what happens to their completion rates or quiz scores.

If you’re a membership site owner, Your community is a big part of the product you sell and will help you attract and retain members.

A brand, such as a Software company, may have completely different goals for their communities, such as: B. Customer retention, new sales, and actionable product feedback.

Here are some KPI ideas for both:

Learning community KPIs

Brand Community KPIs

• Student Graduation Rates
• Student Test Scores
• Student Retention
• Student Lifetime Value

• Customer retention and activation rates
• Churrn (lost users)
• New and updated users
• Number of actionable product suggestions

1. Create community guidelines and rules

It is important to have rules and a moderation strategy to keep your community free from trolls, spam, and abuse.

Community rules and guidelines make it clear what kind of behavior is appropriate for the community.

Facebook highlighted a few important tips for writing great group rules, but to summarize, Community Guidelines typically cover the following areas:

• Member Behavior n (and what constitutes “being an idiot”) – what is expected of members and the line drawn between passionate de bate and just being an idiot
• Moderator behavior – what moderators can and cannot do
• Topic focus – which topics are relevant for the community? Which topics are irrelevant?
• Complaints and resolution process – how can people report complaints and how do you deal with them?
• Zero tolerance for discrimination and harassment – that goes without saying Everyone should be welcome and not feel alienated from your community

Here are the group rules we use for our branded community for course builders:

Related: How to Create Community Guidelines (Examples + Template)

1. Choose a Community Hosting Platform

When most people think of Online -Communities think they think Think about social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn that allow users to create groups and pages to attract their followers.

Having a social media community doesn’t mean imperative that you have a community strategy h evening To highlight the difference, we’ll compare and contrast, then share how to use both.

• Free Social Community
• Branded or Owned Community
• An argument for using both platforms

Related: The 10 best online community platforms compared

Free social community platform

Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit are great examples of free platforms to build a community on.

There are two major advantages to using social media platforms to host your communities. They are:

• They are free. Building a community on social media only takes time and effort.

• Native users are looking for you. A large portion of your audience are native users, which means they are familiar with the platform and how it works . It also means you’re more likely to be discovered organically when people search for communities like yours on the platforms they’re already using.

On the other hand, there are a few downsides to using free Community platforms:

• No real ownership and control. While you are free to set the rules within your group, add and remove members, and delete content, you do not actually own the platform.
• Distractions. Because social networks are designed to generate advertising revenue, it’s difficult to create an experience that’s free of distractions.
• No way to fill your funnel. Group members don’t need to give you their email address or payment to join.

Branded Community Platforms

Branded Community Platforms (aka Owned Communities) are run by the community owners from their own platform under their own URL.

A branded community could be as simple as a comment section on your blog or a private forum. But with Thinkific and other platforms, you can build your own community where users can register, post content, and connect with other community members.

The main benefit of branded communities is that you have full control of the content, branding and experience.

Because you control the content on your own platform, your users can enjoy your community free from distractions like ads and other content.

The other great benefit of owning your community is that you can bill people for access, e.g. for subscription member sites.

One of the downsides is the learning curve for members who need to learn how to create their profiles. Sign up and start posting on a new platform. Discoverability is another consideration – if you’re hosting your community solely on your own platform, you’ll need to find other ways to promote your community.

Here’s a screenshot showing how a branded Community based on Thinkific works:

An argument for using both free social communities and branded communities

You can think of social networks as a Extensions of your overall community strategy, but they’re not the be-all and end-all as community items can be hosted on your site.

There are benefits to using a combination of free and communities.

Here’s an example of how a brand might approach their community strategy, including both platforms:

Example TacticsPlatform ValueStakeholdersFree Social Media CommunitiesWebinars and PromotionsVisibility, discoverability, reach, simple Onboarding.Sales & MarketingBranded Community PlatformProduct FeedbackControl, Exclusivity, Narrow Audience, GatedProduct & Support

Sales and Marketing may want a point of sale to connect with their prospects and… and to get in touch with customers.

A Facebook group would be a great place to post new offers or webinars, and your community would be discoverable to new potential members. Success stories like Tien’s posted within the group can help reassure or motivate your customers or even inspire new prospects to convert.

But let’s say you wanted a little taste of your best customers give a new product to work on without tipping your competitors or sharing with the crowd. Or maybe you want full control over building and customizing your community, or even charging for it! Then a branded community could come in handy.

1. Identify community stakeholders

If you’re a solopreneur, congratulations – you’re the only stakeholder you need to consider. As a solopreneur or even part of a small team, you probably have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to managing your community.

Once your community grows enough that you spend more time doing your job in the community than in your company, a community manager would be a great addition to your team. If you don’t have the budget to hire someone, you should reach out to active members of your community to see if they would be willing to help moderate the group. Facilitating a large group is in many cases a professional achievement.

Bigger brands like Google and Facebook, and mid-sized brands like Thinkific and Brit + Co, have multiple stakeholders across the organization that should be engaged, which means their community can span multiple platforms.

The following table provides a list of common stakeholders, their strategic value, and the types of tactics they could implement with your community.

StakeholdersStrategic ValueTacticsMarketingNewsletter Subscribers Check membership questions for emails that members respond to before joining your community GroupSalesSales PromotionsAnnouncement of sales promotions within the groupSupportUse your community to answer support questionsCreate a support community forum for customers to post/answer questionsProductProduct Feedback.

User problems, motivations,

Product Suggestions

Reshare product updates and order F ask eedback

Our entire team is present there because they know how important it is to actually show up and interact with our members.

MIKE MORRISON, THE MEMBERSHIP GUYS

1. Create your community

Now that we’ve covered the options for building your community, we will cover the steps required to set up your community.

Thinkific expert Kim Garnett shared some tips for implementing learning communities with Thinkific:

First, make sure that you invite your students! Add a lesson to your welcome chapter and email, with a link to join the group and a summary of what they can expect from joining. When you first start building your online community, it will certainly require more work on your part. Posting prompts and encouraging interaction will land on you, at least until the community starts to grow and co-create more group content.

KIM GARNETT

Another Thinkific expert and recently Co – XayLi Barclay, host of our annual Think in Color series, has created an excellent step-by-step guide to creating a community on Thinkific:

Your options may vary by platform, but they do on this one the general steps to follow when setting up your community:

1. Customize your community

By hosting your community on your own platform, you can customize things like fonts, colors, and keyframes without the noise and distractions that come with social community platforms.

Whether you’re building your community on social media or your own platform, make sure that S ie update your group description, profile picture and cover photos.

• Community Description

The community description is like your elevator pitch – it should capture the essence of your community at a glance Read capture.

See also: How to make a 3D website with VECTARY

Brit + Co’s description conveys who the community is for and what people in the community can do, along with a friendly reminder that they are a positive, encouraging, and accepting community:

• Cover Photo

Your cover photo is the most visible element when users first click into your community huh making it the perfect piece of digital real estate to brand your community and business.

Dana Malstaff, online course creator and successful community builder, is the founder of Boss-Mom® – a community for entrepreneurial moms. She created a cover photo for the group that makes a difference:

• It creates personal branding
• It shows you what the community is about with a slogan
• It has a call-to-action for free training

• Membership Questions

Maybe also want to add membership questions that people answer when they want to join the group.

The Thinkific community asks how people found us, if they have an account with us, and for permission to add them to our mailing list . Sharing an email address is an easy way for members to provide you with value in exchange for the value they receive from the community.

If you want to mitigate demand even further, you can offer freebies for new members, which is a common email list building strategy.

• Link your group to your Company Page

If you use Facebook groups , it’s a good idea to link your group to your business page. This helps community members follow your non-community posts and helps drive some more traffic to your site.

1. Define your team’s roles and responsibilities

If you’re a solopreneur, you are on the hook for almost anything. But once your community reaches thousands of members, you’ll likely need help.

Your strategy will determine who you need, but in general your team might look like this:

• Day-to-day management: Many companies assign this task to community managers. But it’s also common for customer support or a social media manager to manage the community at the beginning.
• Webinars: When hosting webinars for your community, you need someone who appears on the screen, moderates the chat, lets people into the meeting and helps with audio and video.
• Support: Who is responsible for answering? “How To” requests and other support matters? This is especially important if you offer a product or service.
• Sales: Who is responsible for answering questions about pricing and packages?
• Product: Who generates product ideas from the community and responds to feature requests?

1. Group Topics

Hashtags and pinned topics make it easier for your members to search. Admins can tag posts and create group hashtags, which will then appear right next to the main feed for quick access. Here are our top three topics:

1. Review and test the member account creation and login process

To ensure that a smooth start, you should put yourself in your customer’s shoes and test the account creation and signup process.

This will help you see the community from their perspective and ensure they are approved and received Access to everything they need.

If you have a small team or a few close friends, ask them to go through the creation and signup process as well. Testing the process can only give you more confidence that it’s working properly.

1. Set up welcome messages and onboarding content

Stay in the shoes of your customers and ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the first thing they see when they join the community?
• Do they know how to use the community? post what Where to post?

A welcome message pinned to the top of your group will help your new community members succeed.

Another great way to get new Communities welcoming members consists of tagging all your new members in one post for the week. Encourage them to introduce themselves and invite the community to welcome them.

1. How to Build Engaged Communities

The key to learning how to builds communities, learns how to build engagement. The more engaged your community is, the better your results will be.

Start by setting the tone for your community early on and sparking opportunities for members to get involved often.

See this article for a more comprehensive list of online community engagement ideas. Here are a few key tactics to get you started.

1. Create a theme for each day of the week

Creating a topic for each day of the week is a fun way to keep your community focused on the topics they came for. It’s also a great way to give your members ideas for posts.

Here’s an example from the Becoming a Blogger Facebook group:

In addition to stimulating conversations in the community, these posts also help a place for users to network, brag, or even self-promote, something that’s expressly forbidden outside of that one day of the week. This is what the Sunday post looks like:

1. Ask questions and encourage group discussions

This is a great opportunity to stimulate discussion and create engagement within your group.

There are many benefits of including topics for group discussion in your online community. For one, it can help encourage critical thinking and analysis.

It can also be a great way to get different perspectives on controversial or hot topics, which can help group members process changes in their field or industry. A great example of this is a question we recently posed to our Thinkific community:

ChatGPT is a hot topic and it really gets people excited to…let’s say chat about it. In this scenario, Aaron used the question to get people talking about these hot new tools and how they could be used to help online course creators.

1. Create an adjective for your community members

An adjective (nickname) for your members creates a sense of identity and makes your group members feel like you , being part of something bigger yourself.

You’re probably familiar with this concept from the music industry. For example, Beyonce’s fan base is called Bey Hive and Lady Gaga calls her fans “Little Monsters”.

Tiffany Aliche, known as Budgetnista, refers to her group members as Dream Catchers.

“DREAM CATCHER: A legacy builder, success seeker, doer; a sisterhood of women exercising their power to live richer.”

TIFFANY Aliche, THE BUDGETNISTA

1. Join the discussions and answer questions

While successful communities tend to fuel themselves with very little input, you are who your members originally came for. It’s important to be responsive and visible in the community.

If someone suggests a topic for your next course, pitch in with feedback or clarifying questions. Maybe someone will suggest a new feature. Dive deeper into the use case and ask others if they feel the same way. Or maybe there’s a conversation that catches your eye. Get involved by giving feedback or just give your two cents.

1. Share content that lives exclusively in your community

Community-exclusive content can as a strong incentive because it shares information members can’t get anywhere else. That kind of exclusivity and value keeps people coming back to your group.

Examples of exclusive content include:

• Live Q&A with you
• Free worksheets, checklists, guides or templates
• Your very own insight on a common theme or trend that you see in the group
• Special offers or discounts on your premium products

This type of exclusive content it should be published regularly, be it weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly. The more regularly you share, the greater the value to your community.

1. Foster accountability

Procrastination is easy when working alone. But when you have an accountability partner, it’s a lot easier to stay on track because you can motivate each other.

This is especially true if you have built a learning community such as an online class community or membership site. Cohort-based groups work very well for this very reason.

Encourage your community members to connect and build relationships with at least one person in the community, and you’ll see higher completion rates, happier members, and more success.

1. Expand your online community

Market your community

When it comes time to start your community, your community will not grow from scratch. You may have the best idea for a community in the world, but it doesn’t matter if your clients or students don’t know about it.

Here are a few ways to promote your community after launch:

1. Send an email to your newsletter subscribers or existing customers. We include a link to our community in the onboarding process for new clients.
2. Add a link on your website to help attract website visitors to your exclusive community
3. Share on social media. If you have followers on other platforms, chances are they are also interested in the exclusivity and value of your community. Let them know where to go!
4. Encourage members to invite others. What better way to grow your community than to leverage the existing connections of your current members?

Related: 13 Tips for Building an Online Community

Track Your Results

Analytics are key to monitor real progress. Seeing comments or likes on a post is one thing, breaking down growth spikes or trends is another.

Analytics can help you determine which posts your community enjoys the most. What brings the most engagement? When are your members most engaged?

Here is a snapshot of Thinkific’s community growth:

We weren’t surprised that our group picked up momentum starting in March when COVID-19 hit. But if your growth can’t be explained by economic or global trends, look for the source of that surge. Your group may have been shared by members or featured online somewhere.

Get to the bottom of the growth and try to reverse engineer it. If growth comes from something you can control, then you’re on the right track to continue fueling that growth.

Download the Free Community Builder Kit!

Learning to create community and see it through is hard work, but it’s not impossible. There are many free options, like Facebook, to start your community. But if you want full ownership and control, or the ability to add a paywall to your community, Thinkific is here to help!

If you’re passionate about what you know, or if you want to create a social ecosystem for your most engaged followers. There is no better time than now to start your online community.

This blog was updated in February 2023, it was originally published in November 2022.

See also: 10 Tips for Creating Great Blog Titles

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