Jordan Miller

So you’re a small/medium sized business who purchased one of our plans and launched a new community. The topics, replies and views will start to rack up any time now, right? Riiight?! Perhaps you’re a major brand wanting to give your customers a place to connect, ask questions and get more information, but aren't sure how to inspire them to join. Maybe you haven’t even pulled the trigger and launched a new community just yet because you fear your hard work won’t be seen so what’s the point? You feel confident nailing down the color scheme, header, navigation and forum categories, but the dreaded “0 replies” is casting a gloomy shadow over your bright and shiny new community. A lack of initial momentum is one of the scariest hurdles a new community builder faces. Here are a few tips to kick off your community in style and start receiving engagement right away. Be visible. As your community’s leader, it’s important to be accessible to your members. Make yourself available to them so they know you’re willing to lend a hand. This helps forge meaningful connections with your community and fosters trust. Being visible looks like creating topics, responding to members’ posts, answering private messages, enabling a contact form and including a profile photo. Use your voice. You can’t expect your members to speak up if there isn’t a community leader or brand ambassador doing so first. Lead by example and use your voice in your own community. This is also a great opportunity to shape the tone of your community, whether that’s informative, casual, snarky or funny. The tone of your community: Sets a precedent for how members respond. Broadcasts your brand’s values. Defines how a member can connect. Inspires guests to silently react. Expressing your community’s tone adds character, helping you differentiate from competitors. Create content that invokes an emotional response. This is one of the best kept secrets! Creating content that inspires a feeling from your members is a surefire way to keep them continually participating and returning. It's one thing to make content, it's another to create valuable content. Value enhances a member’s life, quantified by whether it produces a positive effect. Publish content that invokes an emotional response and watch how quickly your engagement rate climbs. Provide a great user experience. Generally speaking, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but when it comes to community building, a slick user interface helps facilitate a great user experience. In case you missed our blog post about the importance of your brand’s look and feel, creating an immersive visual experience for your community matters. A few quick design tips: Ensure your navigation is easy to use Employ a beautiful color scheme that reflects your community’s tone Add spacing in between components Include a logo Promote your community You likely have some type of presence on social media. Use that as a tool to drive traffic to your community (versus what most people do: use social media as the be-all and end-all for promotion). If you have a following on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, you’ll want to entice and mobilize your existing base to join your community. Do this by being visible, using your voice, creating content that invokes an emotional response and offering a great user experience (see what I did there?). How do you engage your community? Drop us a line in the comments. We’d love to engage with you!

The Invision Community platform is capable of integrating with other powerful services, creating a unified system of connections with the click of a button. One of the greatest benefits of integrating with Invision Community is instant expanded functionality. This is often done through an API (application programming interface), which allows our platform to seamlessly communicate with third-party developed software like Google, Zapier and SendGrid. We also use webhooks to integrate. Webhooks allow other services and applications to stay in sync with your community data or to perform an action after a specific event occurs in your community. Read more about them here. I had a chat with one of our developers, @Daniel F, who walks us through webhooks, explains why they’re useful and shows us an example (see the video above). In the example he uses, we would... Here are a few integrations we want to put on your radar: Zapier What is it? Zapier is a service that allows you to connect over 3,000 web apps. The Invision and Zapier integration can communicate with some of the Internet’s most wide-reaching platforms, including Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Trello, Facebook Ads, ActiveCampaign, Zendesk, Asana, Salesforce, Hubspot, Discord, Stripe and more. Read our Zapier blog for more details (it’s worth your undivided attention!). An example: When a moderator posts a topic in a news forum, share it on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms. MapBox What is it? MapBox shares dynamic, performant, and customizable maps that can connect and visibly show where your members are around the world. An example: Create events that link to specific locations and specify where they’re taking place. Google Tag Manager What is it? Google Tag Manager is a tag management system that allows you to add and update your own tags (snippets of code like a tracking pixel) onto your website for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more. Tags that can be incorporated include link clicks for events, scroll tracking, contact form abandonment, commerce shopping cart abandonment and more. Expect to see more functionality with Google Tag Manager in our platform later this year such as quantifying total amount of reactions in a post. An example: Tracking when a member clicks the ‘start new topic’ button. Google Analytics What is it? Google Analytics is a web analytics platform that shares statistics and basic analytical tools for SEO and marketing initiatives. Understanding your website’s data, including who is visiting, how often, for how long, device usage and more can better help you optimize your community. An example: Tracking unique visitors over the course of a year, then comparing that data to the previous year. Whether there’s an upward or downward trend, analyzing the data can help you create a plan of how to proceed, as well as understand what is (and isn’t) working. SendGrid What is it? Sendgrid is a cloud-based email delivery system. It’s a vehicle for your community to send emails to your members. An example: Sending a monthly newsletter using the Bulk Mail function in the admin control panel. Integrations are an efficient way to take your Invision Community platform to the next level. There’s even more in your ACP that we didn’t discuss in this blog. If you have an integration in place that you’d like to share with us, or have an idea, drop us a line in the comments and let us know. Related:

Branded communities mobilize your impassioned fans and customers. If you’re even a little familiar with community building, you’ve probably seen marketing jargon about why owning your own community (and not exclusively relying on social media) is absolutely imperative for growth. Relying on social media is a gamble. At any given time the social media giants can take away your platform and following you had spent years building. Meaningful ongoing conversations aren’t really a thing. No customization; your social account won’t have different functionality than everyone else (there’s a few exceptions with Instagram, but it’s based on follower count). With a community, you can grant your members far more flexibility and power. Companies that thrive know of social media’s limitations. They opt to also include a community component to their brand because it’s a serious advantage. They use social media as a tool to drive traffic to their community and get to know their clients/customers on a deeper level. Owning your own branded community... Strengthens brand identity. Duh, but not really. I’d say most companies fail to establish a real look and feel. This is done by evoking an emotion in the customer through an intentional balance of visuals (colors, logos, fonts) alongside experiences the company, along with the community, creates together. Builds trust with the consumer. Getting digital face time with your customers, sharing content and offering value on a consistent basis are the building blocks of trust between company and consumer. Gain this, and become an authority in your industry. Provides a deeper understanding of customers' needs. Save money on market research. Tap into your audience's needs free of charge. Encourages an open dialogue. Customers want to feel heard! Create an environment that's a two-way street so their thoughts and feelings don't fall into the Internet abyss. Creates visibility. At the heart of any business are the customers. Show them your true colors. Your brand’s look & feel matters Now that we’ve nailed down the ‘why,’ let’s touch on the nuts and bolts, err… colors and fonts. Don’t underestimate the power of a cohesive and imaginative visual associated with your brand. When you think of McDonald’s, does your brain fire off a pair of golden arches and a ketchup red color combo? When thinking about Coca Cola, maybe a cursive font bubbles up. Apple is internationally admired for their visuals and product presentation. These aren’t accidents. Companies spend millions of dollars on marketing to perfect the brand’s look and feel. Your community should aim to feel as immersive as possible through its branding. Your community, powered by Invision Community, was designed with that in mind. In the admin control panel, community leaders can design their own theme, including colors, fonts, headers, footers and logo. Take a look at how some of our clients transformed their communities into something extra special: Squarespace Fiverr Corsair Those communities enlist our enterprise services. However, if you don’t have the marketing budget just yet to create a totally custom look and feel, we have a new option at your disposal starting today. We just launched a theme service available for all Invision Community clients on our standard plans. We’ll create you a theme based on certain criteria and keep it updated throughout future platform updates. If that’s something of interest, please visit this new page on our website and reach out to us to get started. Design your new theme today. Owning a branded community doesn’t need to be complicated. If your idea is solid, and your intentions are to unite and connect like-minded people, then you’re golden. Are you interested in a branded community? Do you have a community that could use some extra attention? Are you ready to launch a new community but don’t know where to start? Drop us a line in the comments and we’ll respond to you.