In the digital age where everyone is connected to the Internet through a phone or laptop, online communities are easily accessible and can be found everywhere. For digital media brands looking to build a community around their platform and increase both subscribers and retention, it’s best to formulate guidelines to ensure your community is a safe space for your audience to interact within. This ensures that your users will be more interested and invested in your content, and is one of the best ways to keep them coming back for more.
Having a set of basic community guidelines is a fundamental first step that you’ll take in creating an engaging online community. These rules can be tailor-fitted to suit your audience and detail what the purpose of your community is. With these guidelines in place, you or your moderators have a framework that can be enforced to prevent toxic users or contributions from negatively influencing your brand image.
That being said, for those that are starting a brand new community, it’s easy to get stuck on the specifics of these guidelines. To help you and your brand continue to grow and expand its following, we’ve gathered some tips and basics to help you create community guidelines below.
Define the Scope of Your Community
The first and easiest step is defining what you intend to achieve within the community. Starting an online community usually involves providing a communal space where users can interact with each other and discuss your brand and offerings. Most brands are already aware of their expectations and goals within their community – it’s just as simple as putting it down to paper.
Where your guidelines will be applicable is also worth considering for the long term. The boundaries where your community needs to stay in line with your rules are important. For the sake of consistency and ease of use, most brands will govern the use of their entire platform and all services using community guidelines.
Keep your guidelines clear and simple
Your community guidelines must be clear, easy to understand, and impossible to misinterpret. By making them simpler and less open to alternate interpretations, you’re leaving less room for gray areas and loopholes to get around your intentions. Keeping your community guidelines simple also makes it easier for a wider range of users to follow them and makes your community more inclusive as a whole.
Additionally, try to avoid using technical jargon and difficult words within your explanations. More often than not, the average user won’t pay too much attention to roundabout wording that’s difficult to process. Having a ton of legalese is only going to fly past them.
Finally, be clear and decisive about specific situations and conditions that may arise within your community’s interactions. For example, in an online community centered around sports, ensure that you make it clear that team-based discrimination or flaming isn’t allowed.
Make it Easy to Access
When creating a set of guidelines for your consumers to follow, keep the community’s guidelines somewhere that all users can easily access. It allows new users to easily find them before they use your platform and services and lets the regulars know where to go to refresh themselves on what is and isn’t accepted.
It’s also important to remember how your users see the community as a whole. The purpose of having a set of community guidelines is to protect your users as well as your own brand image while they interact with each other and discuss your content offerings. Make sure your guidelines aren’t too strict and stop users from feeling like they belong and are a part of the community.
Enforce the Guidelines
Once you have a set of guidelines ready for your community, make sure you know how to enforce them. You and your moderators need to know just how many warnings a user can get before they’re suspended or banned. If you choose to hand out warnings instead, reiterate how they cannot continue to contribute to offending and toxic content using a strike-based system.
You’ll have to outline specifics like what happens to posts that are flagged as problematic, and you’ll also have to define what steps a moderator will take when they find something inappropriate. It’s also a good idea to explain whether the offending user is offered public or private warnings before action is taken.
Knowing how you plan on enforcing the guidelines and following through with them whenever it’s necessary is an important part of maintaining a healthy online community.
Define your moderation strategy
How effectively you enforce your guidelines can determine whether your community is ultimately successful, and it plays a vital role in keeping audience interactions safe and enjoyable. It’s important to do your best to outline the various types of behaviors that will be moderated or penalized so that there’s no confusion later on when you need to take action.
If you plan to stamp out toxicity and offending content from the community space, you’ll need the moderation tools and a dedicated team of moderators to follow through. Make sure to have these functions in place, and have a discussion within your moderation team to determine the processes and steps to follow when coming across interactions that are against your community guidelines.
Encourage and reward your audience for following the guidelines
Your approach to guideline enforcement shouldn’t just be about dealing with out-of-line behavior – it should also encourage and reward the type of interactions you want to see on your platform. Implementing an alike system for comments and providing badges and other forms of recognition for outstanding community involvement are some ways in which your audience will have additional incentive to adhere to your community guidelines and expectations.
You can also leverage the awareness and presence of your existing membership – that is, the majority of audience members who aren’t engaging in inappropriate or troll-like behavior. Let your audience know how to report when they find something that acts against the guidelines, or when they find content that is offensive or toxic.
Conclusion
All in all, a good set of community guidelines can go a long way toward establishing norms and acceptable interactions within an online community. Digital media brands looking to move their interactions with their audience from third-party websites like social media onto their own platform will need to come up with a proper set of guidelines to improve their brand awareness, image, and audience membership.
