While 48% of the current world population uses plenty of social communities, there are just a few hundreds that rule the top positions globally. Among all of them, there is a huge difference in how users interact and what they talk about. While Facebook has a massive reach and is known to build social connections, Twitter is used mostly to stay updated and informed. LinkedIn is for professional networking & Reddit is best known as a social news aggregation and discussion website.
Not all social communities are the same!
While there are plenty of social apps and communities out there — only a few hundreds are able to grow and retain their user base beyond a limit.
The Common Thread: Opportunity to Communicate
One thing that’s common between the successful communities is how each one of them offers a conducive space for one-to-one as well as group communication. These platforms are designed to allow users to:
- Share thoughts and ideas
- Transfer knowledge
- Ask questions
- Receive answers
- Seek assistance and empathy
Why do some social communities fall off?
Every community consists of people who share the same concerns and views, want to share experience, or get help and advice. As a community grows its user base, it is bound to have smaller groups and one-to-one connections, where people may not always want to share, comment or discuss their thoughts publicly. Failing to provide them a private space for conversation often results in the users taking their conversations to other platforms.
Build and retain community interactions→ Add a Chat Function
For any growing social community the immediate and most logical step is to build and retain community interactions. Losing conversations to chat-specific platforms will dwindle your growth. Offer them a space to chat privately or in a small group with the like-minded people. This is how giants like Facebook and Reddit have retained their users for years. The success of a social community solely depends on users’ ability to communicate — with groups, businesses, as well as with one another. So as soon as the user base grows and you start seeing some interactions taking place publicly, invest in offering them more occasions to interact with each other.
Better conversations → Increased Engagement → Improved User Retention
Real time chats enable more conversations on the platform and help you engage users in creative ways. With an in-app chat function you can allow them to react, reply, share media and audio, video, gifs, etc., send push notifications, and create interactive experiences for your community. Having someone to connect with, exactly when they need, gives them instant gratification and increases user engagement with the brand too, which ultimately reflects on user retention.
Users Want to Bond and Feel Like They Belong
When the community does not offer a chat feature, they may opt for a different tool, such as Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or other real-time chat apps. Don’t develop a habit in your users to communicate outside the community. Give both→ public forums where they can express their opinions, share links, images, and videos, join publicly available discussions, and a place to chat with each other privately. Once they leave, they may not return.
Build and retain real-time community interactions on your platform with Applozic.
It’s time for the growing social communities to create beautifully functional and feature-rich chat apps. With APIs like Applozic, you can ship your real-time chat applications in a matter of hours.
