Joining a business community can be the most important decision you made in regard to your personal and professional growth.
Staying connected to like-minded people, especially to those from the same business branch is of essential importance.
For starters, being a part of such a community can make you more visible and help you get hired. Also, being discovered by recruiters greatly improves your negotiation capabilities.
It is always better to be approached for a position than just to apply for one.
Even more importantly, you will have free access to vast knowledge generated by your peers. You can simply soak it up just by reading or being a part of a conversation.
This will also expose you to topics and ideas that you’ve never even heard about before. If you are into technology, this is a great way to be updated on the latest developments.
If you are still a learner, you can get in touch with experts and learn from them.
However, if we are considering online communities, not all of them offer deep expertise and knowledge – you will have to choose carefully, according to your specific needs.
Allowing yourself to learn from other peoples’ experiences is a wise decision regardless of your specific area of interest.
This is a great time saver as well, as you won’t have to spend weeks, or even months, scouring the internet in search of answers to your dilemmas.
An often overlooked or underestimated, facet of a community is that it can offer you crucial support in difficult times. Professional development always comes with a whole host of psychological challenges.
When you feel like the whole world is against you, help from people who were once in the same dark place but came out of the other side can be a life-saver.
Also, it’s fun! Having friends is just very nice. Having a connection with interesting people, or just making jokes with them, can make your work experience much more pleasurable and fulfilling.
Especially if we consider that many people work isolated these days.
Great tools for maintaining business communities have been launched by different companies. One example is the new app launch by AvaTrade trading company: AvaSocial.
The app enables social trading, a way for traders to stay connected, and a great learning opportunity.
AvaTrade is a company that provides traders with 250+ instruments including 55 currency pairs, 14 cryptocurrencies, and 617 stocks and shares, as well as CFD trading.
It also offers research and tools everyone would love taken into account when trading.
As depicted on different trading blogs such as TopRatedForexBrokers, overall, AvaTrade boasts great trading platform offerings and a vast amount of it.
Pretty big bite for a newcomer to swallow. But now it gives the chance to its users to connect and share their knowledge for better success. This is a great example of how many companies now follow this trend.
As we already indicated, you can make the connections either through an online community (through forums, groups, platforms, and apps such as AvaSocial), or in-person by being a part of an offline community.
We will mention just a few characteristic business communities, both offline and online, from different professional areas (coding and developing, SEO and internet marketing, trading):
Developing
Women Who Code
An international nonprofit organization that provides a global community for women in tech with events, coding resources, jobs, mentorship, and more.
They aim to inspire, support, and help women develop technical skills and excel in their careers.
Hashnode
An online community where developers share knowledge and grow their careers. Developers from around the world participate in discussions on Hashnode.
You can write stories, ask open-ended questions as well as technical questions, ask questions anonymously, and start polls.
SEO and Marketing
OnlineGeniuses
This online community, with more than 17.000 members grew out of a Skype conversation. When the chat grew to more than 300 members, the founder David Markovich decided to create the community. It is now a strong community of great SEOs, marketers, and other IT professionals. Every applicant is manually vetted.
#Backlinks
A community of like-minded professionals trying to solve the two big issues every website owner faces: getting the best content and getting backlinks.
The members help each other by sharing articles and content ideas, finding opportunities for guest posts, etc.
Trading
Besides new apps such as AvaSocial, Traderwave Trading Community on Facebook has been with us for a longer time.
Started by Philip Teo of Traderwave with the aim of helping independent traders share and learn from one another. This Facebook group is where easily digestible trading-related photos and graphics are shared.
If you are looking for something lighter to get started, this could be a good group to join first.
Gathering Of Traders
Another Facebook group for traders. This one was started by Jonathan Tan of Charting Academy and is dedicated to discussing trading signals in the financial market.
If you enjoy looking at the charts, you will find like-minded people happy to discuss their analysis of each chart.