Hiring an experienced manager for your social media campaign or Salesforce community development is a good start for great community management. Unfortunately, many communities have been launched without any adoption strategies or without a well-planned content plan. Against the odds, some of them are still functioning without effective management.

A content plan and a dedicated manager are key elements that have to be considered before launching a partner or support community from Salesforce. There are many things you can do to grow your Salesforce community and some of them are just essential.

Here are five of the best practices for developing your community:

• Always provide excellent and free content for your community users. A general truth about content is that it is always king on the internet. Ensuring interesting content and offering experience in your sphere of business are the keys to success.
• Combine the first rule with the second – be honest and transparent with your customers all the time.
• Use principles of gamification within your Salesforce community – reward the most active contributors with points, prizes or titles.
• To stimulate communication and interaction, implement tools and practices for sharing ideas and commenting on articles.
• Find and recruit some key influencers in your business sphere. Use their experience and authority for your needs.

Advantages and Limitations

Koa is a standard Salesforce community template. It lets users search for articles and it is optimised for mobile devices. The Koa template only has basic features and a standard set of colours for its design. A drop-down menu in the header provides quick access to the User’s Profile, Contact Support page and Log Out option.

Advantages of Koa template:

• Supports Knowledge and Cases modules
• Optimised for mobile devices
• Possibility of searching for and viewing articles

Limitations of Koa template:

• Does not support Chatter Questions and Question-to-Case
• Does not support Ideas and Chatter modules
• Text-based template with a basic set of features
• Poor design

Advantages and Limitations

Kokua is a standard self-service community template. It allows users to search for articles and to contact support. The information focuses on Data Categories. Users can find relevant articles, but the community only works well when the Data Categories are set up correctly. You can set the number of categories that should display, with a splash image for each.

Advantages:

• Supports Knowledge and Case modules
• Optimised for any kind of device (tablets, desktops and mobile devices)

Limitations:

• Does not support Chatter Questions and Question-to-Case
• Does not support Ideas or Chatter by default
• Does not support My Feed page
• Setting up data category images can be done only via comStudio