How to Make a Safe Online Community for Your Business?

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When a person is passionate about something, they will want to seek out people with the same passion. Sometimes, you can’t find anything or anyone near you to share that passion with offline. Enter, online communities. It’s almost a guarantee that whatever your passion is, you’ll find others online who share it.
For a business, this is where you will learn the most about how customers view your business, and the place where they will learn the latest news about your product or service.

Customers can find their own little niche and become a member and enjoy that feeling of belonging to a particular community.

Strategy

As a business owner, you want an interesting platform. Your first point of interest would be from here where you can take any of the many e-learning classes that will help you not only in creating a community, but in running your business online. You can learn how to create a webinar or podcast, or a forum, or find content producers; all of which will get your community engaged, which is really the main point of having a community. E-learning platforms are extremely useful and flexible for entrepreneurs who want to improve their business practices and managing their sites.

Your second most important issue is cyber safety. People of all kinds, from different states and from all parts of the globe can join your community, but you don’t know who is who. While you want to assume the best in people, the fact is online is pretty weird and wonderful at the same time. But you don’t know what can happen with people you don’t know or only know online.

You will need to know more about community management and develop a strategy. For a start, you’ll want to answer these questions: Why are you building a community? Who do you want to attract? What is it you want to achieve? How are you going to go about achieving it? Where will the community be? (a forum on your page, or a social media group page, etc.) When do you plan to activate the group?

All these questions will help you attract the right people and build a successful community, while limiting a good amount of people who might just want to cause havoc in it.

Some of the steps to take might seem obvious, but you might have a loophole in some of these obvious factors, so take note of them.
Guidelines and passwords:

This is one of the more obvious things you want your community to have. According to one of the biggest, free online security software companies, 83% of Americans use unsafe passwords. That means a whopping number of people don’t even know that their password can be easily detected.

For your community, you can provide an indicator of password strength for their login. You can help members by advising them that passwords should be at least 10 characters long, and for their own safety to include numbers, special characters, and a combination of both upper and lowercase letters.

Inactive accounts:

Like an old abandoned house or car, someone can eventually claim it their own and make themselves comfortable in it. An inactive account makes the community unsafe for everyone in it, and is sent haven for hackers who can get into it can simply change the password.
A simple way to avoid this from happening is to have accounts automatically deleted if left unused for a certain duration of time. But, always give the user a heads-up before deleting.

Limit link exchanges:

Always remember the online world is full of hackers, phishes, spammers, and trolls. Most of them depend on creating fake links which aren’t difficult to do. It’s normal that people post all sorts of things and links on public platforms.

Try to make it a normal practice that private messages aren’t used as the vehicle to send clickable hyperlinks. Plain text links can make it easier to stop users from following a fake hyperlink which could be a virus or spyware.

Fix problems early on:

When technical problems go too long unattended to, they just get worse, or at the very least they’re not going to fix themselves. Mark it on your calendar to have a weekly or monthly time to check your site for any weaknesses or loopholes.

Creating an online community is a great idea for your business and your customers. From the community, you will know the nitty-gritty of what your customers are pleased with and which areas need improvement. To gain the most from your community, you will want to put in the effort to keep it engaged and safe.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —