A brand community, or connected group of fans of your brand, can boost customer loyalty, improve word-of-mouth marketing, and help your brand uncover key insights that improve your business performance. However, developing that group of deeply devoted fans takes time and the right tools. These resources can help you manage, moderate, and nurture a brand community to coalesce around your small business.

Substack

Substack has emerged as one of the most powerful channels for building an active community. With more than 35 million active subscribers, Substack empowers writers and creators to build a direct relationship with their audience through newsletters and paid content. The platform is built to host conversations with features like comment sections, discussion threads, and direct messaging. One of Substack's core components is facilitating conversations between writers and readers and among readers themselves, creating a sense of belonging and community.

[Read more: 6 Ways to Create a Sense of Community at Your Small Business]

Forj

Forj is a platform designed for associations and professional networks to build online communities, offer learning experiences, and increase member engagement. Its goal is to help organizations grow their membership, revenue, and impact. While the product is geared toward professional networks, brands can also use Forj’s tools to create channels and topics for community members to unite and start conversations.

Circle

Circle is geared toward content creators, with features for hosting discussions, creating courses, hosting virtual events, and chatting with members. Circle has more than 3,000 integrations, widgets, and reporting tools to help you grow your community with care. It can host video, audio, and images, plus it has gamification options to keep members engaged with your content. For instance, you can reward members for interacting with one another or posting a high-quality conversation starter. This type of feature gives you a way to identify future brand ambassadors too.

McKinsey Consulting reported that brands that use the community flywheel approach convert more than 4% of online traffic to sales. Moreover, more than 75% of content about the brand is user-generated.

The community flywheel

The community flywheel isn’t a service or platform but rather a model for building a strong community around a brand or product to drive growth and customer loyalty. The community flywheel has five elements:

  1. Knowing your consumers and the communities to which they already belong.
  2. Choosing a few “hero products” to champion in the market.
  3. Using authentic brand and customer stories to bring these hero products to life.
  4. Feeding content into the community members engage with.
  5. Making it easy for customers to transact with your brand online and offline.

McKinsey Consulting reported that brands that use the community flywheel approach convert more than 4% of online traffic to sales. Moreover, more than 75% of content about the brand is user-generated. Companies like Drunk Elephant and Gymshark have used the community flywheel to successfully grow.

Loyalty and rewards apps

Loyalty programs are a great way to encourage community around your small business. Sephora’s Beauty Insider program, for instance, drives 80% of the company’s overall sales. It’s also one reason why Sephora is rated as one of the most valuable brands in the world. Beyond sales, loyalty programs can incentivize user-generated content, increase referrals, and lower customer acquisition costs.

There are dozens of loyalty and rewards apps and platforms your brand can use to start building a more active brand community. Belly and Fivestars are two options for small businesses. Clover POS includes an add-on loyalty program, as does Square.

[Read more: How to Create a Customer Loyalty Program for Your Business]

Social media engagement tools

Once you have a thriving, vibrant community, you need a way to maintain and moderate it. Tools like Sprout Social Engagement, Sprinklr, or Hootsuite make it easy to respond to comments, tags, and posts on your social channels. These platforms unify your social channels into one central dashboard so you can monitor activity across your social media profiles and respond to direct messages in one place. Some include artificial intelligence functions that can generate automatic responses while your team does deeper troubleshooting.

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