E-Commerce merchants should consider creating their own niche online communities for a number of reasons, including:
- Strengthening the relationships with your customers;
- Gathering customer feedback;
- Giving customers and employees a sense of ownership of your company, products and services;
- Keeping your brand in top of mind with your customer.
Here are three inexpensive tools that you can use to build a niche community.
1. Ning: Ning is a hosted solution with a feature set that includes shared user profiles, blogs, forums, photo galleries, support for video and podcasts, a Facebook-like activity stream (newsfeed), event calendar and groups. The platform also integrates with other social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Ning also offers several revenue-generating opportunities, which might interest ecommerce merchants.
2. Groupsite: Another low-cost option is Groupsite. Groupsite bills itself as "social collaboration" software, which suggests that the focus is on the group itself more than on the brand. It is developed for the purpose of collaborative;
3. vBulletin: Forums also referred to as bulletin boards. It is one of the original types of online communities. And vBulletin is one of the most popular freestanding forum software platforms. vBulletin has expanded from the classic forum model and now offers a community suite consisting of forums, photo albums, groups, event management, polls, blogs, and article-based content management system publishing.
Unlike Ning and Groupsite, which are hosted solutions, vBulletin has to be downloaded to your server. You must purchase a one-time license to use the software. The software platform used to build an online community is important. But it is less important than the role played by the community manager.
For more details about Social Network Websites, Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.
