More Ways for Solopreneurs to Use Online Community Forums
In a previous post I discussed the advantages of owning and managing your own online community, including privacy concerns, flexibility to grow and hedging against changes in social media platforms. It’s useful to ask, what can an online community do for the solo entrepreneur or practitioner? In conversations with many of these folks in my coaching and consulting business, they most often mention the factors of time, privacy and marketability.
Save time using your online forum. The world – virtual and real – is a busy place for entrepreneurs and soloists. On top of the usual demands of the job, whether meeting with clients or completing creative projects, there are all the duties required of a small business person, including networking, marketing, bookkeeping and so on. Add managing a growing social media following to that list and it is easy to become overwhelmed. Many entrepreneurs I know don’t even use Facebook or Twitter for fear of wasting precious time on activities with low ROI.
Online community forums can ease the burden by grouping many roles in one convenient platform. Discussion forums can cover the social interaction piece, especially when the platform has capability for rich text, images and video; Feedback forums can supplant the need for survey software, expensive market research and time-consuming focus groups; Q&A forums can function as an easy-to-manage customer service platform; Article forums can help you get expert information out to your client base and prospective customers.
All this with one login!
Solve privacy issues. As I sat sipping a steamy café latté at my favorite indie coffee shop the other day, I received an apology from the owner for not responding to my Facebook friend request. “I have too much at stake,” she explained, “to risk mixing my private life with business, so I have a policy against friending my regular customers.”
While we often think about how privacy issues impact our clientele, the solopreneur in a highly visible job or industry must also consider her own need to carve out a private life. Online community forums create a nice way to keep work at work, giving the community manager control over the content, and offering a private platform that targets a market segment. Unlike social media, the manager controls who sees what content, helping keep business and personal separate, if that is what is desired.
Create marketing opportunities. It can be exhausting for solo-artists, performers, authors and small business people to market themselves. In an age when bricks and mortar commerce is giving way to Web sales, I know one painter who manages to sell most of her work through her social media connections, putting her livelihood at serious risk if her favorite platform gets hacked, and subjecting her customers to heavy advertising.
More soloists are finding that creating a community with membership benefits creates exactly the caché they need to propel their sales to the next level. Owning one’s content and contact list through an online community forum puts the solopreneur in close contact with their market where they can learn firsthand about customers’ preferences and experience. It’s also a great strategy to launch beta products in an online community where one can get immediate and trusted feedback.