What is an Online Community? Definition, Benefits & Examples
“Brands should think of themselves not as storytellers but story builders. We plant seeds of content and let our community build on it.”
– Amy Pascal, Business Executive and Film Producer
In today’s digital-first world, online community is no longer optional, it’s strategic. For coaches running paid courses, businesses launching new products, or even agencies managing client relationships, online communities are becoming powerful growth engines. They help businesses build deeper relationships, increase retention, and create long-term brand loyalty.
As internet usage continues to grow, more people are turning to digital spaces to connect, learn, and collaborate. According to a report by Global Web Index, 76% of internet users participate in online communities, engaging in forums, blogs, and groups across various devices.
But what exactly is an online community and why are so many businesses investing in them? Let’s discuss that in detail.
In this guide, you will learn:
- What is an online community?
- Private communities vs social media groups
- Examples of branded online communities
- Benefits of building online communities
- Who should build online communities
- Online Community Engagement Ideas
What is an Online Community?
A group of people who communicate online over a common interest, problem, or objective is called an online community. Without physically meeting, people who share a sense of belonging utilize these communities to study, grow their networks, share knowledge, or discuss their interests.
Who Uses Online Communities? (Real-World Examples)
- A business coach can create a paid mastermind community to deliver group coaching, shared resources, and peer accountability.
- A fitness or wellness studio can create a private member community where clients access workout plans, live class schedules, nutrition tips, and peer support.
- A SaaS startup can build a customer community to reduce support tickets, collect product feedback, and improve retention.
What is a Branded Online Community?
A professional network that unites individuals around a common, organization-based experience to promote broad online collaboration and growth is known as a branded online community. Your company can link members, clients, staff, partners, and any other audience it wishes to reach with this kind of community.
Branded online communities are very important to your members’ experiences. To give greater value, they dismantle the conventional one-way information flow and open up communication.
For businesses that want full ownership and customization, dedicated community platforms like TribeCrafter allow you to create a fully branded, private community; without relying on third-party algorithms or limited social media features.
Open vs Closed Online Communities
Branded online communities come in a variety of forms. One of the primary distinctions between them is whether they are searchable and public, private (accessible only with an invite or login required), or hybrid having some public components but requiring a login to access them all.
The number of people who may profit from the information is maximized in open communities because anyone can view the talks that take place. The membership and contribution requirements for these groups are typically somewhat loose.
Open communities are like the Public Subreddits which means group’s material is visible to everyone. Making a contribution is as easy as creating an account and selecting the appropriate community to join.
Although this slows down community growth, it makes it simpler for leaders to steer conversations in the right direction. Members of closed communities frequently derive great benefits from them.
Online Community vs Social Media Groups
Difference between branded online community and social media groups
Usually, people confuse large social media networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn with online communities. Although both the types may have some similarities such as a common goal of connecting people online.
However, the major difference lies in the core functionality and features of the strategies behind targeting the audience.
The lack of ownership is one of the biggest limitations of social media communities. This is where a private community platform like TribeCrafter shines. Unlike social media groups, TribeCrafter gives you full control over branding, privacy, member access, and engagement tools. All in one customizable platform designed to grow your private community effectively.
Reasons for Choosing private community over a social media network
I recommend using a private community for your business instead of social media networks for a number of reasons:
Added Security
The privacy of the community and its members are the top priority of these private online community platforms. Social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn offer limited control over the privacy of both members and the community owners.
Moreover, when you are part of any open source platform, you will have limited control over how the users’ or your own data is used. This may lead to various security concerns such as data hacking.
One such example of a massive security breach is the famous Facebook data breach that occurred in 2021 where the personal information data of around 533 million Facebook users was leaked.
Control over community
Being a community owner at a social networking site, you are bound to follow the rules set by these networks. So, every time there is a new regulation, you will have no other choice but to follow the changes with no autonomy.
Smooth community management with specified tools
Most of the community platforms, such as TribeCrafter, offer powerful community management tools that further simplifies the hassle of managing your communities. These tools are designed to give community owners full control over their platform’s configuration, members, content, and monetization.
Improved access to community data
Unlike social media communities, private community platforms allow you to have complete access to the community data. You can monitor this data and track the overall performance of your community in terms of engagement. Hence, access to your community data helps you track the progress of your community towards the specified business goals.
Examples of Online Communities
Nike Run Club
With the Nike Run Club, running can now be more enjoyable. Members of the Nike online community can participate in various events to win medals and awards. Every fresh record you set earns you a reward. You get to boost your profile with every run. By giving amateurs the impression that they are sportsmen without actually being athletes, Nike won over the hearts of all of them. As a result, Nike’s online community has grown immensely over time.
Apple Support Community
One of the largest tech enterprises, Apple, needs no introduction. Its users can share their experiences and receive peer-to-peer support through its extensive discussion forum. The Apple Support Community includes a number of interactive features and lets them hang out electronically as well. Members of the community can receive unique incentives by participating in various events held there.
Buffer
This Slack sub-community was the first iteration of the social media management software. On their website, they do, however, now have a devoted branded online community due to their growing popularity. On Twitter, members participate in in-depth conversations, find new resources, pose questions, and more. Additionally, twice a year, Buffer gives its community members the opportunity to host on Slack. They can greet newcomers, initiate conversations, and more here. They are also able to take part in the monthly Zoom meetings.
Benefits of Online Communities
Private online communities can help your business expand in many ways. They boost member or customer loyalty and revenue in addition to helping organizations as a whole.
For course creators and businesses, these benefits translate into tangible business outcomes, such as recurring revenue, higher client retention, reduced support costs and stronger brand loyalty.
Let’s discuss in detail the benefits of online communities:
Stronger Engagement and Customer Support
Online communities create two-way communication. Instead of just broadcasting content, businesses can have real conversations with members.
- Coaches can answer questions and provide accountability.
- Startups can interact with users and gather product feedback.
- Agencies can maintain ongoing client communication in one centralized space.
This consistent interaction strengthens relationships and increases long-term loyalty.
Improved lead generations
With online communities, nurturing your prospects and generating leads become easy. Coaches and consultants can encourage the prospects inside their community before offering paid programs. 59% of organizations use online communities to provide customer support, leading to increased customer satisfaction and potential leads.
The kind of online community you build will determine how quickly you can persuade potential buyers to purchase your goods. Additionally, it might motivate current clients to make additional purchases.
Increased brand awareness
Every post, comment, and shared experience contributes to brand visibility.
When members actively participate, they amplify your brand message organically. This reduces dependency on paid advertising and improves word-of-mouth growth.
Enhanced trust
Agencies and SaaS brands can build credibility by answering questions publicly and transparently inside their community. 85% of brand owners state that having a branded online community builds greater trust among their audience. In the current digital world, connecting and interacting with customers, prospects, and audiences has almost become a need for businesses.
A branded online community allows members to share experiences, testimonials, and insights publicly, building social proof naturally.
Valuable customer insights
Communities provide direct access to customer feedback.
You can learn:
- What problems your audience is facing?
- What features they want?
- What objections prevent them from buying?
Specifically for SaaS companies, this can directly influence product development.
Ready to Build Your Own Online Community?
If you’re an educator, startup, or a business looking to build a private, branded community with full control over your data and member experience, platforms like TribeCrafter make it easy to launch and manage your community without technical complexity.
Who Should Build an Online Community?
Online communities are especially powerful for:
Course Creators & Educators
Coaches can create private membership communities to deliver courses, host Q&A sessions, share resources, and build recurring revenue through subscription plans.
Startups & Small Businesses
Startups use online communities to reduce support tickets, collect product feedback, improve onboarding, and increase customer retention.
Agencies
Agencies can build multiple private client communities to centralize communication, share reports, provide updates, and strengthen long-term client relationships.
Types of Online Communities
Online communities may vary depending upon the type of business, their goals, structure or mode of moderation or management. While each type of community has its own key features, it is also worth noting that a specific community can come under more than one type of community.
Following are some of the community types that should be considered important to discuss:
- Branded Community
- Learning Community
- Social Community
- Fan Community
- Membership Communities
- Networking Community
- Insight Community
- Community of Practice
- Local Community
- Support Community
- Community of Action
If you want to explore more about the types of community, check out our blog about types of online communities.
Online Community Engagement Ideas
Community engagement refers to the interaction and involvement of the members of your virtual community. This involves actionable steps to encourage members’ activity and connections that encourage them to participate in the community.
Needless to say, that the higher the community engagement the better.
Before formulating a successful community engagement strategy, you should keep in mind that each strategy should align with the specific business goals. In other words, the engagement practices that you intend to apply for your customer community might not be suitable for someone with a non-profit community.
Following are some of the practical ideas that will help you boost your community engagement:
- Encourage Freedom of expression
- Ensure a smooth onboarding experience
- Plan engaging community events
- Encourage new members to engage through welcome posts
- Focus on the content format
- Gamification
How to Start an Online Community
Specified set of goals
While creating an online community for your organization, it is mandatory to have a set of goals in your mind that you want to achieve with the community.
For example, a startup building a product-led community will focus on user education and feature discussions, while a coach running a membership community will prioritize peer interaction and accountability.
Pay special attention to selecting community moderators
With the right community managers team, you can make it thrive effectively.
You can either hire a new team or select from the existing ones. Make sure to hire someone who has a knack for social media or running online communities and has in-depth knowledge of your brand’s vision.
Take inspiration from the competitors
Taking inspiration from your competitors and their growth strategy is a great way to effectively run and grow your online community. This method will broaden your perspective and give you a new understanding of how to grow your community.
Plan an effective engagement strategy
There is no point in having a virtual community, if there is zero or minimum community interaction.
In order to productively grow your community, you should set up an excellent community engagement strategy.
Online Community Moderation
Community moderators are the people who make sure that the community rules are implemented and followed by the members. Their key role is to go through all content posted on the community to ensure that it aligns with the community guidelines and regulations.
If any community rule is broken, then it is the moderators’ job to take the necessary actions. These actions may include practices such as removing the content, muting the member or in some cases permanently removing him from the community.
Apart from monitoring the activities of existing members, moderators also take care of who can join the community.
Read more about how to moderate an online community on our blog.
How to Measure Community Engagement
There are tons of matrices that you can measure in your community. However, there are only a few that are truly responsible for impacting the KPIs of the community. This is because only a small number of engagement measures will enable you to determine whether the objectives of your particular community are being reached.
What is community engagement rate
The community engagement rate (CER) tells us the percentage of community members that have interacted with others in any way.
Community engagement rate is calculated by dividing the number of community members engaged with the total number of community members.
Community engagement matrices
Active members and contributing users: As the name suggests, active members refer to the number of people actively participating in the community. You can monitor daily active users (DAU), weekly active users (WAU) and monthly active users (MAU).
Just like active users, it is crucial to monitor contributing users. You may get a glimpse of how many members of your community are participating (and how many aren’t) by comparing the number of active users with the number of contributing users.
Member growth: Member growth is the amount of new members added to your community in a specific period of time.
Your community’s membership growth rate also tells you about the popularity of your virtual community.
Key takeaways
For businesses looking to build deeper relationships with their audience, an online community is more than a communication tool, it’s a strategic growth asset. Online communities are the easiest way to promote communication with your intended market, customers, stakeholders, etc. Online communities can be launched as private, branded communities or on social media networks.
While private online communities offer greater advantages in terms of management, moderating, and forum control, social media platforms are still suitable for novice users. Virtual communities have a number of noteworthy advantages and can provide you with valuable customer data. It is an excellent way to interact with your audience directly and it makes business growth simple.
Build Your Own Branded Online Community
Now that you understand what an online community is and how it can benefit your business, the next step is implementation.
If you’re ready to move beyond social media groups and build a fully branded, private digital community, TribeCrafter gives you:
- Full ownership of your member data
- Advanced engagement tools
- Custom branding options
- Analytics to track growth
Create your online community with TribeCrafter today.
What is an Online Community? – FAQ
Q1: What is the purpose of an online community?
A: Online communities help people connect, share knowledge, and support each other around a common interest, industry, or goal.
Q2: What are the different types of online communities?
A: The main types include:
- Social Communities (Facebook Groups, Reddit)
- Support Communities (Customer service forums)
- Professional Communities (LinkedIn Groups, Slack workspaces)
- Learning Communities (Coursera, Udemy discussion forums)
Q3: How do I create an online community?
A: To start an online community:
- Choose a platform (e.g. TribeCrafter).
- Define a purpose and rules.
- Engage members with valuable content and discussions.
- Moderate and grow the community organically.
Q4: What are the benefits of online communities?
A: They provide:
- Networking opportunities
- Support and advice
- Knowledge sharing
- Brand and business growth
Q5: How can businesses use online communities?
A: Businesses use online communities to:
- Provide customer support.
- Gather product feedback.
- Increase brand loyalty.
- Offer exclusive content and networking.
