5 Easy-to-Implement features to get the most out of Salesforce Community Cloud

With the influence of global pandemic, many businesses have realized the power of digital engagement and interaction with their customers and partners through online collaboration like never before. Salesforce Community Cloud has been playing a huge role in empowering companies to create and continuously upgrade their online community to help users. Since its creation in 2013, it has rapidly increased its flexibility, meanwhile decreased its complexity. As your company’s Community Manager or Salesforce hero, you are able to deliver an enhanced community experience to your customers and partners without even writing one single line of code.

Ok, I admit the subject might be too dramatic. I’m sure many of you guys have known and implemented them in your community. But if you haven’t and are interested in improving your community use, here are my all time 5 favourite features for Salesforce Community Cloud.

Top Feature №5 — Progressive Rendering

Do you know you can control the display order of components on your community pages with Progressive Rendering. Although this is a very powerful feature, not all communities need to use it. But when you do need it, you really need it.

Many mature communities are heavily customized with different types of components on their pages. If you notice that your community pages take a long time to load before you see the components rendered on the screen, then progressive rendering may help improve your performance. This will absolutely boost your user experience on your communities.

However, before you activate this feature, it is always recommended to use the Community Page Optimizer tool to determine if Progressive Rendering is a good choice for your community pages and to get suggestions on how to prioritize your components. It can also help you evaluate the performance impact of your configurations. Always remember, it’s best only when it fits you.

Top Feature №4 — Multilingual Communities

Companies with customers and partners all around the world can absolutely understand the importance of engaging with their customers and partners in their native language. Using Community Experience Builder, you have many tools to help you perfectly tailor your international user experience.

The great thing about this feature is, when you create a multilingual community, you don’t have to create a separate community for each language. And there’s also no need to duplicate pages within the community for each language. Instead, Experience Builder lets you add translated content to the properties of each component.

The options of translating are not limited to the platform resources. For the communities where high quality professional translation is needed, you have the options to export community content as an .xml file and send it to external professional service for translation. Later you can import it back into your community to populate each page component with the translated content.

You can also integrate your Google Cloud Translation API key to provide the ability to instantly translate posts, questions, polls, and their comments, answers, and replies.

Top Feature №3 — Community Management Insights & Dashboards

Managing communities can be confusing without a data driven approach. Community managers should always use community activity related data to understand their engagement level with the users. Community Experience Workspace provides us a central place to comprehensively understand everything this going on in the communities.

The easiest way to get it started is to download a Salesforce Community Management Package from AppExchange. It has all the pre-defined and ready-to-use insights, dashboards, reports, and moderation controls which community managers need to drive adoption, monitor engagement, and build a vibrant community. These pre-defined tools give you a super-focused look at a specific area while helping you with day-to-day community management. They will also help you prioritize your work and give you instant access to what matters most.

If you haven’t started using data driven approach to manage your community, it’s time to have this package downloaded and start exploring!!!

Top Feature №2 — Automate your Moderation

Imagine you had a community with over 100,000 users and they are actively interacting on everyday. No matter how many moderators you have, the job could be chaotic and troublesome. As one of the most crucial parts for a community to thrive, Community moderation provides us many tools to empower members of your community to monitor content and ensure that it’s appropriate and relevant. And Moderation Rules is one of them.

Using Moderation Rules can automate the process for community moderator and do the heavy lifting for you.

It can help you with monitoring member-generated content. Two types of moderation can be automated. The first one is Content Rule, which allows you review and approve contents based on keywords. It can protect your community from offensive language and inappropriate content created by spammers or malicious members. The second type is Rate Rule. It is used to monitor and limit how frequently member-generated content is created in your community. It can protect your community against spammers and bots that attack your community by posting the same message multiple times in a row.

Whenever you create a new community, there are many pre-configured moderation rules come with it. You can modify them based on your own business challenges. They can all be ready to use in just few minutes.

Top Feature №1 — Target your Audiences

What information are the most engaging ones? The answer is simple, the ones that your customers need the most. To make your community the most useful and targeting, you’ve got to make it more personalized, relevant, and customized. With Salesforce Community Cloud, you can use Audiences to define community member segments.

What’s great about this is, how flexible and and easy to use it is. You can use it on your navigation menus, your pages, your components, and many more. You can control who sees what based on their profile, locations, and even Salesforce record’s attributes.

For example, if a company offers a service that is different in different states in the US. You could simply create different audiences of the same community rather than creating multiple communities. Using Experience Builder, you can apply sets of criteria to pages, components, branding sets, or navigation menus to show completely different views to different audiences.

I hope you enjoyed reading my favourite top 5 picks in Salesforce Community Cloud. Please leave a comment to tell me what are your favourite community cloud features.

If you want to learn more about community cloud and get yourself certified as a Community Cloud Consultant, make sure to check out my newest Udemy course “Salesforce Community Cloud Consultant Exam Bootcamp”, where you can learn every concept in details and get to practice over 60 real exam style questions.