Want to know how to use Viber Community for your business? This article will explain everything you need to know about Viber Communities, including Viber Community features and how to create and grow your Community.
What is Viber Community
Viber Community, formerly known as Viber Public Chat, is a huge chatroom consisting of people with a common interest. It is normally used by celebrities to connect with their fans and by businesses to gather prospects and share updates, promotions and more.
Compared to Viber Groups, Viber Communities support more members, have more advanced features and are ideal for privacy-conscious users. We’ll explore these features in the next section.
Viber Community Features
The most remarkable aspect of Viber Community is its ability to have an unlimited number of members. As a result, Viber has introduced tiered management roles to assist businesses in managing and moderating their Communities.
Here’s a simple summary of Viber Community’s tiered management roles. For more detailed information, read the Viber Communities knowledge base article.
- Superadmin or the Community’s creator has full control over the Community
- Admins are appointed by superadmins and play a vital role in moderating and creating Community content
- Members are Viber users who join the Community and must abide by the Community guidelines
To grow a Community, superadmins can share the Community’s link on their website and social media or allow members to invite their contacts through an invite link. Those who want to join the Community must have the Viber app installed on their phones.
When a new member joins the Community, they will get full access to the chat history to view conversations, insights and updates shared prior to their membership.
Most importantly, Viber is protective of its users' privacy so no one, including superadmins and admins, can see members’ phone numbers. Besides that, members who enable private messages can contact each other while keeping their numbers hidden.
Now that you're acquainted with Viber Community's basic features, let's move on to the advanced features: message features and moderation capabilities.
Viber Communities: Message Features
Viber provides numerous messaging features to help superadmins, admins and members communicate easily. To express opinions and communicate clearly, Viber Community members can react to messages, respond directly or mention a member.
Superadmins and admins can pin a message to the top of the chat to initiate a discussion or highlight an important topic. For example, they can send the Community guidelines and pin the message so it is visible to all community members.
They can also use the polling and quizzing tool to create a fun Community engagement session. Next, we will talk about Viber Community’s moderation capabilities which will help superadmins and admins to control their Community.
Viber Communities: Moderation Capabilities
Moderating a Community is crucial as it is the only way to ensure members follow the Community guidelines. If a member violates the guidelines, superadmins and admins can delete the offending message or all their messages, and warn them privately.
If the member still refuses to adhere to the Community guidelines after a private warning, superadmins and admins can remove them from the Community or ban them so that they won’t be able to rejoin the Community.
Superadmins and admins can unban these members. However, they will not be automatically added to the Community and will need to rejoin via an invite link or be added by another member or admin.
Why Use Viber Communities for Business
Being in the same chatroom as prospects propels businesses ahead of their competitors as it allows them to convert prospects into customers on a platform where members anticipate updates from businesses.
If you're in an area where Viber is popular, create a Community to enhance your visibility. In the Philippines, for example, many large businesses create Viber Communities because Viber is one of the most popular messaging apps there.
There are many reasons why businesses should use Viber Community. This section will discuss how Viber Community can increase business visibility, create a positive user experience and create highly engaging activities.
Increase Business Visibility
Community messages appear alongside private messages in the Viber inbox, granting them high visibility. You can even get creative by creating a promotional sticker pack that will automatically add users to your Community when they download them.
Promoting your sticker pack on the sticker market is an excellent way to enhance Community's exposure as Viber no longer allows Communities to be discoverable through the search bar. If you want to be discoverable, contact Viber to turn your Community into a channel.
Create a Positive User Experience
Viber’s moderation features allow superadmins to choose whether their Community should be a two-way communication platform or a one-way communication platform to share updates and promotions by regulating members’ writing privileges.
However, even with restricted writing privileges, members can still react to messages sent by admins and superadmins to express themselves. On top of that, Viber also allows them to mute or snooze a Community for 30 days and leave the Community anytime.
To provide a positive user experience and avoid members from muting or leaving a Community, businesses should always ensure that their content is spam free, interesting and relevant to Community members.
Engage Members with Fun Activities
Superadmins and admins can utilize tools like polls and quizzes to engage with audiences and get to know them better while emphasizing the importance of their audience's opinion.
For instance, restaurants can use the polling tool to get members’ opinions on a new pizza flavor or use the quiz tool to create seasonal giveaways and gift lucky winners special vouchers or products.
In addition, superadmins will be able to understand members better, determine the most engaging type of content and plan them accordingly to meet their audiences' demands with the Community insights feature.
How to Create Viber Community
First, you need to set Community goals and guidelines to moderate your Community. Then, you can create your Viber Community by following the steps below. Keep in mind that you can only create a Community on your phone.
1. Tap the compose icon on the Chats panel of your Viber app and click on New Group.
2. Select the contacts you would like to form a Community with and click next. Any contacts that you add at this stage will become admins. After that, you will be directed to the Choose group type page where you can choose to create a Group or a Community.
3. Select Community and fill in your Community details. Then, click on the checkmark at the top right corner. You have successfully created your Community and the contacts you’ve selected earlier will be notified.
How to Grow Viber Communities
Viber allows you to grow your Community by sharing Community invite links. Superadmins have complete control over the accessibility of the link and can disable the existing link anytime. Follow the steps below to send an invite.
1. Select a Community on the Chats panel of your Viber app. Once you’ve opened a Community chat, click on the three vertical dots and click on Community info.
2. Tap on Invite and select who you would like to send an invite to on any messaging app.
For superadmins, follow the steps below to share the Community link.
1. Select a Community on the Chats panel of your Viber app. Once you’ve opened a Community chat, click on the three vertical dots and click on Community info.
2. Tap on Share Community link. You’ll be able to choose how you’d like to share the link. On the same page, you can choose to Allow all members to share the link or Disable the existing link.
How Your Business Can Use Viber Community
There are many great businesses using Viber Community to its full potential. In this section, we will show you how they are doing this — and how you can too.
Create Promotional Viber Sticker Packs to Grow Communities
A promotional sticker pack is one of Viber’s advertising tools to attract users to join a Community. You can create free branded promotional stickers, which can be downloaded from the sticker market to convert Viber users to your Community members.
Communities like Barcelona FC and WHO create sticker packs for Viber users to download for free. In return, users will be added to the Community and will receive various updates, including new stickers which they can download and use for free.
Use Viber Community to Share Updates and Promotions
Many businesses use Viber Community to share updates and promotions with their Community. However, most businesses with this goal in mind do not allow Community members to participate in the conversation by restricting their writing privileges.
Allowing members to reply in a huge Community will make it difficult for superadmins and admins to track conversations and reply to messages in a timely manner. This is when a Viber Bot Account comes into play.
Connect Viber Bot to Viber Community
Businesses that restrict members’ writing privileges have to connect their Viber Bot to their Viber Community to provide a medium for customers to message them if they have any inquiries or complaints.
On the other hand, businesses using Viber as a two-way communication platform can either direct members to chat with them via click to chat links or start a chat with a connected Viber Bot in the Community.
Above all, Viber Bot is a must-have for businesses wanting to track and manage a high volume of messages on Viber. Contact Viber to connect your Chatbot to Viber Community.
Want to have one-on-one conversations with your customers on Viber? Read on to learn how Viber Bot can help you.
Viber Bot for 1:1 Conversation and Bulk Messaging
Do you need Viber for one-on-one messaging and bulk messaging? Create your Viber Bot Account for free and connect to respond.io to start sending and receiving messages!
Viber Bot is an essential tool for businesses using Viber as the main messaging app to connect with their customers as it enables businesses to track and manage messages effortlessly. Learn more about Viber on our Ultimate Guide to Viber for Business blog.
Further Readings
We hope you found this article useful. Here are a few readings that might be of interest to you.
