A user’s activity feed shows a collection of content recently posted to your community. This can include new questions, comments, links, and media.

Community administrators are the people that run your community. They have complete control over all parts of the group. They set rules around who can join and assign roles to other members.

An audience is a group of people that follow your brand. They consume the content you create on platforms like your blog, social media, or YouTube. Audience members typically like what you have to say and respect your ideas and opinions.

An avatar is an image that represents a community member. They allow other users to identify the person who made a post or comment quickly.

Just as physical badges are used by various organizations to denote accomplishments (e.g., The Boy Scouts of America), digital badges are used in online communities to indicate a member’s achievements, skills, or reputation within the community.

A brand advocate is someone passionate about your company who proactively shares your brand with their network. This could be on social networks, in communities, on blogs, or even in offline relationships.

A brand community is a space where customers and people interested in your brand can interact. These people are brought together by a collective interest in your company, its products, and your values.

Community engagement is how active people are in your community. This is important because an active community builds more value and helps members create stronger relationships.

Community flywheel is the idea that by introducing customers into a community, they become central to your brand’s growth efforts.

Community guidelines are the rules that direct how users should behave in your community. They should encourage valuable discussion and ensure everyone knows what is expected of them.

The community life cycle refers to the stages of growth new communities go through. In our experience, there are five growth stages: development, inception, expansion, maturity, and autonomy.

A community of practice is a space where people with a shared interest gather. They are often professional communities, although they can be based around any interest.

A community platform is software that makes creating a fully-featured community easy.

Community-led growth is a go-to-market strategy driven by communities. The idea is that focusing on community-building efforts from launch is an effective way to add significant value to the product experience.

A customer community is a space for your brand’s customers to interact with each other and your reps.

Customer success is when you proactively help customers use your product or service to reach their goals. By helping people get value from your product, you encourage them to stick with your business, thus increasing retention and reducing churn. You’ll also have a more satisfied customer base.

Customer support is the actions you take to troubleshoot customer problems. Good support streamlines the customer experience and ensures that technical issues don’t stop your customers from using your product.

A dark post is a social media ad that appears only for a specific set of users and nowhere else. Such sponsored content is not published on the sponsor’s page or feed and does not display organically in the sponsor’s followers’ feeds.

Dark social media encompasses social shares that lack referral information about their source. This includes shares that happen through messenger apps, emails, and text messages.

In this context, dashboards are tools used by marketers and community managers to understand the performance of the community using a single platform.

Direct messages are sent privately between users, as opposed to content posted on a public community. Direct messages do not appear in either users’ activity feeds.

Also known as “ephemeral content”, disappearing content refers to posts that vanish or self-delete after a set period of time.

Sometimes spelled ‘doxxing’, this is the act of publicly revealing personal information about a user, including their name, home address, financial data, etc.

The engagement rate is a measurement of user interactions with the content created by members of a community.

Enterprise Social Network (ESN) refers to the internal online communities designed to help employees collaborate, share information, track projects, etc.

Evergreen content is designed to remain relevant indefinitely. This content is not time-sensitive in the sense of being tied to a particular event or promotion.

Flaming refers to the use of hostile or offensive language in online communities or discussions, most commonly in the form of text-based messages.

A follower is a user who has subscribed to another user’s account in order to receive updates on their activity, i.e., their posts and engagements with others’ posts.

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) refers to the apprehension that there are significant opportunities—in the form of information, events, or experiences—to which others have access but the subject does not.

An internet forum is a place where people can discuss their interests online. There are forums on pretty much any topic you can think of.

Gamification is when you add elements commonly found in games to other areas of life. A typical example is point scoring and prizes. The idea is that these elements can be powerful motivators.

An internal community is a closed community used to help people in an organization communicate.

An internal community is a closed community used to help people in an organization communicate.

An internal community is a closed community used to help people in an organization communicate.

A hybrid community includes both public and private sub-communities. This way certain sections will be accessible to everyone and certain sections will be available to members with special privileges or role types.

An internal community is a closed community used to help people in an organization communicate, collaborate, and share knowledge.

A knowledge base is a software tool that stores and organizes all your company's documentation. These are powerful self-service resources that customers can use to find out how to use your product—helping you save on support costs.

Leaderboards are a popular form of community gamification in which the top performing members are displayed according to their ranking in the community.

Those who observe the activities of an online community without engaging themselves are colloquially known as lurkers.

Member roles are the privileges given to people in your community. The most common types of roles are admins, members, and moderators.

Membership churn is the percentage of members that leave a community in a given time frame.

Community moderation is the act of managing discussions on the online community. The role is typically performed by community moderators tasked with ensuring discussion meets your community guidelines.

The network effect is a phenomenon in which a product’s value grows as more people use it.

No-code platforms use a visual interface to help users build software. These tools are typically easy to use, which enables anyone to create the product they need.

Omnichannel support is when businesses provide a seamless experience across multiple channels. Your team can offer the same high-quality support whether customers call, email, message, or join your community,

The 1% rule of online communities states that only 1% of website users actually generate content while the other 99% simply consume it.

An online community is a group of people that gather online around a specific topic. The groups are typically based on a particular interest or profession.

An online community manager is a person in charge of running and growing an online community. They are an essential part of any thriving community.

A private community is a community that is closed to the outside world. All discussions and content shared is visible to members only. Private communities may have stricter requirements about who can join than public communities.

A profile is a page of an online community or social media site that represents information about a user or business. These pages allow other members of a community to discover more about the user.

A public community is accessible by anyone. Non-members can browse all content created in the community, which increases brand awareness and visibility. It’s typically easy for people to join these communities.

Q&A software makes it easy for people to ask and answer questions. Company’s use these tools throughout the buyer's journey in places where customers may need an answer to a query.

A post’s reach refers to the number of users who have been exposed to it. Reach may not always distinguish users who have actually taken the time to read a post from users who have simply scrolled past it in their feed.

Reactions are one of the most common ways that users engage with posts. Depending on the platform, reactions can include Likes, Claps, Upvotes/Downvotes, and various Emoji-based responses.

A reply is a public response to a post created inside a community, in contrast to a direct message, which is private.

Reposting refers to the act of sharing another member's post on social media. Examples of reposting on various platforms are known as regramming, repinning, and retweeting.

A member’s reputation is a quantified representation of their trustworthiness within an online community. Reputation score is determined by one or more algorithms combined with ratings given to and by members of the community.

Self-service support is when customers use your resources to find solutions to their problems independently instead of contacting your team.

Social login is a mechanism that allows customers to use the account credentials of a social media site to log in to a third-party service.

Single Sign-on (SSO) is a system that lets people use the same login details for multiple platforms. An example you are probably familiar with is Google, which enables you to use the same details for all its services, including YouTube, Gmail, and Chrome.

A sticky thread is a post that you pin to the top of your customer community. It’s an excellent way to highlight important information and ensure that the content doesn’t get lost in your community's activity feed.

A support community is a brand community designed with the specific goal of providing users with customer support.

A message thread is a series of replies to a single post. Threads are an intuitive way to organize discussions around a specific topic. Anyone who wants to add their opinion to the initial post can do so by commenting on it, rather than creating an entirely new thread.

User-generated content is any media or post created by individual users and published on a platform. The content can be images, videos, blog posts, reviews, gifs, FAQs, or anything else people post to your site.

A verified member of an online community has proven their identity to the admins or owners of that community and is labeled as such as a result.

The ideal outcome for most marketers and community managers is to see the posts in their community to go viral. This means that the post generated an unusually large number of engagements.

White label software can be customized to adhere to a subscriber’s own brand guidelines when building an online community. This helps businesses deliver consistent brand experience across all the touchpoints.