What's the best platform for building an online community?

Question

Moin Uddin · Accepted Answer

Give this a try.

Sam Rye · Answer

Emerging platform from the founder of Ning. It's pretty slick thus far.

James Tattersfield · Answer

Have you had a look at Telescope? It's a good option if you're looking to take an open-source approach.

Artashes Vardanyan · Answer

it's great if you have an initial target group of few dozens of people who can be involved there and bring some engagement. it is simple and I know couple of startup, product, fintech retated communities there, which are pretty active

Marc Köhlbrugge · Answer

I just launched this today and saw your question pop up so I figured I'd share it.

Faces is a way to give your _existing_ community an online home. It's not mean for building a community from scratch, but it serves as a nice overview of who's who for example a meetup groups and the like. It strengthens your community by enabling members to easily find each other and connect. Something that's especially tricky for otherwise offline communities.

Abhishek Maheshwari · Answer

Used this to create my community for IoT developers https://www.iotandus.com.

Arun Sathiya · Answer

Discourse is the best! It's robust and feature-packed that you cannot get away from it. Do give it a try if you have not.

Sam Rye · Answer

Facebook Live is a pretty cool tool for hosting more interactive versions of what we would once have called 'webinars' or the likes. It's less formal, and has greater reach, which is good if you want to run a fairly open community (or an open portion of it), but obviously not so great if you want to preserve anonymity to your users.

Sam Rye · Answer

Depending on what kind of community you want to build, you'll have different needs. But common to most communities are: 
- communication
- scheduling / events
- polls

That's pretty much what Mobilize has built, plus you don't need to force people to use the web app, which means you get higher engagement.

It's free for 100 users, and they've got a cool feature called 'Networks' which means you can scale out the community around certain topics, events or something else.

Check it out!

✎ Espree Devora · Answer

It has tiered levels, can post events, is both on mobile and web, great for ambassadors programs, SMS features plus member only profile directory

Mohammed Rafy · Answer

I have used it quite a few times and their UI is clean and simple including great functionality.

Jakub Rogalski · Answer

I'd go with Slack as well. I am a member of multiple different teams and most of the are super engaged communities that post and talk interesting stuff daily. Other than that, you could also start a subreddit dedicated specifically to your business or an industry if the business is too niche.

Sambruce Joseph · Answer

I've recently found this very attractive and simple tool

Shniur Kiesel · Answer

Flimper is a social media marketing tool that reads every Twitter and Instagram interaction.

We are talking about 8000 tweets per second worldwide & 1000 posts per second on Instagram ¡WOW! 
But our magic is that Flimper can read and automatically reply to these messages in just few seconds, taking all the opportunities giving amazing experiences to every follower on behalf of any brand.

Also, Flimper increases the reach of social media campaigns by over 300%
And we double the return on every dollar invested in Social Media
This makes brands customers love them even more
Flimper use Artificial intelligence, Big data, and Bots.

✎ Espree Devora · Answer

This is what I use for both the LA Tech community and the Women in Tech community. http://community.wearelatech.com and http://community.womenintech.fm

Sam Rye · Answer

I would also heartily suggest going beyond the forum if you're trying to create a real community, where there's a greater degree of trust.

Video calls are a great way to do that, and Zoom leads the way.

Sam Rye · Answer

If you're wanting to build a ProductHunt-esque community, check out this WordPress theme which is pretty awesome. It's tracking the features and direction of ProductHunt, so most things PH can do, PlH can do too.

Andrew Barlow · Answer

Mightybell gave us an easy to use, visually driven community platform that encourages not only engagement but also re-engagement. Highly Recommended!