The future is community—how brands are evolving in the age of social media

In a connected world, they are the information superhighways. Drawn from a diverse population but bound by shared interests, they wield a lot of influence that is only expected to grow as time goes by.

A “community” is an invisible connection that binds us. It is in these communities the future of brands and their success lies. From spreading awareness about cryptocurrencies in small-town India to picking the right make-up, businesses are increasingly relying on them to improve products and messaging.

As we research into individual (creator) communities or larger (brand) communities, we realise that these communities foster bonds, their impact is deep-rooted and most importantly, they watch out for each other. These communities have taken different forms and in this piece, we talk about how companies are envisioning the future of their communities.

From ‘audience’ to ‘community’

Pawan Rochwani leads Community and Partnerships at Pepper Content, a content marketplace platform. He joined the company in February 2021 and has grown the community to include 50,000 freelancers, writers, translators and designers. He believes monetising communities will become a growing trend.

Every brand will aim to convert its “audience” into a strong community, which is more cult-like and highly engaged with the brand. Every brand—direct-to-consumer (D2C) or otherwise—will have community at the heart of its strategy and will hire community managers to support the customer experience journey, which has to be drawn up right from the day a company designs its product.

“We don’t believe any consumer business, specifically consumer fintech businesses, can run without a deeply thought out community strategy,” says Hena Mehta, cofounder of Basis, a financial services startup for women. Financial services are a business of trust and communities help build that.

“We work with corporates, other women-communities and women-centric content platforms to grow our engaged communities,” she says.

The Basis app, which houses its community, financial education modules, curated financial products and more, has been installed more than 1 lakh times. Its community grew more than 15 times in 2020.

Also read: Creators and the power of internet communities

Decentralisation of influence

In September 2020, India-based cryptocurrency exchange WazirX put out a form asking its audience to be “WazirX Warriors”. It received hundreds of applications but shortlisted 15 based on values alignment.

Through these Warriors, WazirX is looking to create an army of creators who can educate people in tier 2 and 3 cities about cryptocurrencies. These days, WazirX Warriors, more than 400 of them, reside in a private Telegram group.

They are a “super-community” with access to the WaxirX team and can contribute to its prestigious blog. They are given crypto rewards for the content they post, provided it is “purely educational”.

These Warriors have 1,000-10,000 followers on YouTube and WazirX aims to decentralise influence by going with smaller creators who have more influence and also create many more such “veterans”.

According to PareenLathia, AVP Marketing, WaxirX, “Most brands go after large influencers, however, our approach is different. We want to create creators and build a ‘super community’ who believe in our mission just like we do. Eventually, we want to rely on them to spread crypto awareness in their own circles.”

Rise of the ‘participative economy’

Eloelo is building India’s first creator-led live social-gaming platform. They have had a million downloads in about nine months, a 70 percent non-metro audience and over 50 percent of the creators are females.

A large part of their effort in building community is based on live streaming and real-time comments, games and interactions. The most popular are Tumbola, ChidiyaUd and the recently added Tota Pundit, an astrology-based game.

“We are noticing an interesting trend around in-app gifting (not monetary but the likes of a Taj Mahal [replica], Paan or Nazar Na Lage totems), where the audience wants to gift and engage with their favourite creators. We believe that like in China, this trend will deepen and will include coins and real currency as the gaming market in India matures,” Eloelo co-founder and CEO Saurabh Pandey says.

Eloelo is also betting big on “participative economy” opening up private live-gaming rooms for creators who want to engage with a select audience, for instance, their Instagram followers. While this was not on the roadmap, feedback from creators got the company to include this feature on the app.

Salone Sehgal, General Partner, Lumikai, says the genesis of gaming is community-driven. The bedrock of every engaging consumer technology experience finds its genesis in gaming. “The loop of positive feedback, simulation of social connectivity and culture of collaboration that has made social media apps so irresistible are all game mechanics in disguise,” says Sehgal. “Take for example features on apps like Facebook or Instagram like badges, tipping, gifting or likes— all find their origin from games.”

In 2020, India recorded about 365 million online gamers and the number is expected to grow to 510 million by 2022, according to Lumikai.

Lumikai is betting on this growth and has launched the first India-focused gaming and interactive media fund.

Community engagement will replace hefty ATL budgets

Direct to customer brands earlier focussed on performance marketing and above the line (ATL) campaigns that constituted roughly 40-50 percent of their marketing budgets.

Eventually, many realised that they cannot scale performance marketing beyond a point and that is when the focus shifted to building their communities.

Vineeta Singh, Co-founder and CEO of SUGAR Cosmetics, says, “Makeup is about entertainment and education and when we started a digital-first makeup brand, we had to figure out how to replicate offline conversations online. That is when we started studying how women buy makeup and invested in our own content team of 18-20 in-house folks who have built the brand ground-up. We focus on building communities on Instagram and YouTube and work with a lot of micro-influencers.”

Engagement while working with a community comes when brands are more mindful of the consumer than sales, she says. It is all about adding value to them.

SUGAR Cosmetics has 1.6 million followers on Instagram and 100,000 of them were added over the last 30 days. The startup spends around 10-15 percent of its marketing budget on the community. Building a D2C community is all about being patient and creating value, says Singh.

Rohit Kamath, Co-founder and Director of India Hemp Organics, an organic medical cannabis and hemp-based health and wellness brand, has something similar to say.

Coming from a highly regulated industry with a product that is fraught with misconception and lack of awareness, Kamath says brands have to manufacture for customers and not the other way around.

Since their industry is not permitted to advertise, India Hemp created its own communities, where users share their problems and stories. “We are in the business of creating experiences and have resorted to content and the community to create awareness for the brand,” says Kamath.

India Hemp Organics has a health and wellness centre in Bengaluru, creating strong offline and online touchpoints. They host yoga and wellness sessions for their community members and create conversations, on as well as offline.

Community helps build new features

Bridgeweave is an AI-based wealth management fintech. During the coronavirus pandemic, it came out InvestorAi, a customer focussed app that uses artificial intelligence to come up with predictive investment ideas.

The startup promoted InvestorAi through webinars and built a community of trusted users who downloaded the app.

InvestorAi has more than 12,000 users and two WhatsApp groups and a Telegram community where the company gets direct feedback. It has helped the app to evolve, including adding the much-requested “profit-loss alert” feature allowing the user to only track a signal but also be notified if the price moves beyond a range.

“I am amazed at the depth and intensity of participation by our communities. They have made us better,” Bridgeweave founder Akshaya Bhargava says. He is a part of all the groups and regularly interacts with the customers, adding a personal touch.

Similarly, WazirX has also unveiled a “your favourite cryptocurrency” feature on request from its community. It wanted to make the community feel heard, which they did.

Communities, however, are still a misunderstood concept and there are some challenges that the people we spoke to shared. Here are some of them:

1 Confusing an audience for community

2 Not thinking of community as a strategy

3 Evolution of the role of the community manager— payments are still low

4 Associating the right KPIs for communities

5 Clubbing community with sales and expecting revenue from community “as-a-channel”

This is an evolving space. As time goes by, communities will have an identity of their own and may become even better known than the brand itself.

(This is the second article in a three-part series on internet communities)