5 Things to do with your Lithium Community before the year wraps up

If you own a lithium community and are looking forward to improving it before the year wraps up, now is the time to delight your users with a community make-over in terms of visual appeal, usability, and business value.

“Today’s consumers demand a better experience, and if the brands they are engaging with don’t deliver, those consumers will quickly move on,” said Rob Tarkoff, President, and CEO of Lithium Technologies.

In the era of extreme expectations, customers look for continually innovative and creative digital experiences. Companies are looking forward to communities that are able to:

• Provide 24*7 instant response
• Offer enhanced user experience across different channels
• Resolve customer issues faster
• Reduce support costs
• Help design and build better ideas and products
• Make the customer feel valued

Running your community on the Lithium platform empowers the stakeholders with options to innovate and enhance the community experience frequently.

What changes you can try with your Lithium Community this New Year

1. Make it Responsive

By making your community responsive, you will be able to empower customers to connect with brands anywhere, anytime resulting in higher customer engagement. Lithium has recently launched the responsive community in its 15.9 release. This update is currently available via their professional services but is expected to roll out to developers in the near future.

2. Add the notifications widget

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, where we get instant updates in the notification bar, Lithium has already evolved its notification. So, if you really want to take your community to the next level, you can do it just by adding these notification widgets.
Example – To see how notification widgets work in a community, visit Optiverse community. Login or sign-up to see the notifications under the bell icon.

3. Make it more SEO-Friendly

SEO plays a critical role when it comes to maximizing a company’s online presence. If your community is SEO friendly, your website and community pages will achieve a good spot in search engines.
For long, community managers have been finding it hard to leverage SEO to its full potential, but in the latest Lithium release, admins can make it easier for the search engines to find and categorize the community pages by defining unique Page Title tags

4. Build Brand Consistency

Consistency is crucial for brands to grow. It fosters the connection between brands and customers, building a sense of community and inspiring consumer loyalty. Here are a few tips for maintaining the consistency of a brand on different online communication channels.

• Use consistent branded citations – Make sure the descriptions and images you use are consistent, crisp, sharp and attractive.
• Publish authority content – Pick topics that allow your clients to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise. Use author bios to qualify the author’s expertise. Also, try to use a consistent style of author photos that refer to the brand.
• Establish the personality of your brand – People follow a brand on social media because of its voice. This ‘identity’ is an important part of your brand and business personality, which should be consistently followed across myriad channels.

5. Implement Federated Search

Before the 2015 curtains roll down, plan out to collaborate the search on your community with other sites. Federated Search is a great option to enhance customer satisfaction, increase case deflection and reduce time to resolution via faceted search technology (Read more). Once you implement federated search in your community, you will get a better control over your search results.

Want to get the most out of your Lithium community?