One of the hardest things you can set out to do when building an online community is getting people to contribute useful content.
The challenges with building community
Twitter rarely generates anything more than cursory comments because of its brevity. The majority of facebook and blog comments respond to the post rather than add a significant amount of value to the conversation. Forums are amazing at generating user content, but unless you have critical mass – its far too easy to end up looking like a virtual ghost town of inactivity.
So how do you get people to contribute useful content online to build your community?
One good way is via a public Question and Answers section.
Where you have people gathering together and answering each other’s questions – you have a collective hive of readers who help each other and in turn – generate a lot of useful content which help other people in the future as well. It’s easy to find answers to common questions with a system like this.
The thing is – it isn’t really that easy to roll your own Q&A site. Or is it?
Building your own Q&A site
Enter Answerbase – which is a complete end to end solution. Using your own customized domain, it is completely white labeled to your branding and provides a solid platform to build your community on. It has a ton of features and pricing starts at USD15 per month (Free trial available). A small price to pay for the obvious rewards. An example of this would be GetApp, a community around business software.
Features & Benefits
There’s a whole slew of features for the service like mobile optimized sites, voting on answers, comment and moderation abilities, and much more. Features aside, there’s a lot more to community building than just interaction. Through interaction people build more content for search engines to index, leading to more potential traffic (which you can monetize on by placing you own custom ads – Answerbase has no advertising on your site). If you’re using this for support purposes, it can also act as a community where people discuss and solve each other’s problems – which means lots of manpower savings for support staff.
Data Liberation – Yes
The first question I asked the guys at Answerbase was if it was possible to port your data out? My biggest fear about using any platform is that you’re in a real danger of being locked in to their system. The good thing is that data can be ported out to CSV if you decide to stop the services at any point.
This post was sponsored by Answerbase, but my opinion does not differ from the review. It truly is an interesting service and a compelling way to build an online community. Please check them out and let us know your thoughts. Thanks Answerbase for being our sponsor this month and helping keep this blog afloat :)
