If you’ve read our detailed Circle.so review, you know it is a pretty impressive online community management platform.
With Circle, you can easily create membership programs, run online community groups, sell online courses, host live workshops, and share content with your audience in various other ways.
To be honest, it is among the most innovative and robust platforms we’ve seen in the e-learning space.
So, it wasn’t surprising to hear about Community AI, Circle’s AI-powered content creation and community management features.
But what exactly is Community AI, how does it enhance content creation, and is it worth using for your online course business?
We’ll answer these questions in detail in this article.
What Is Circle Community AI?
Community AI is a suite of AI features to help Circle community owners create more valuable, meaningful, and tailored content for their audiences faster than ever.
Thriving communities are built upon the willingness of their members to help each other by sharing personal experiences and creating actionable and high-quality content.
But most online community owners and users don’t actively create such content because:
- Content creation is time-consuming and requires in-depth research.
- They can’t think of the right words to express themselves.
- They don’t know enough about the problem to contribute meaningfully.
Community AI solves those problems by giving you content creation and audience insights tools.
It uses the latest advancements in AI technology to help you understand your audience’s behavior, needs, and how they interact with your community. Based on its insights, you can answer your members’ questions through text and visual content.
Your Circle community members can also access some of these features to create better content and add more value to the discussions.
In short, Community AI leverages artificial intelligence to help you and your Circle members build stronger relationships based on helpful, reliable, and engaging content.
The Core Tools And Features Of Community AI
Community AI offers three separate AI tools that enhance your content creation and research abilities as a Circle user.
- Content Co-Pilot: A robust AI-content creator designed specifically for online communities.
- Automated Transcriptions: A surprisingly efficient video transcript and closed caption generator
- Activity Scores: An innovative audience insights tool to gauge audience behavior and engagement with your community.
Together, these three features help you:
- Create engaging content faster.
- Enhance your video content’s reach.
- Understand your audience’s needs better.
Let’s dive deeper into these features and learn how they can help you create more valuable online communities.
How Content Co-Pilot Works
As the name suggests, Content Co-Pilot is your writing assistant inside Circle. It solves one of the biggest problems of a content creator – consistently creating high-quality content.
Whether you want to create a new post for your community or a lesson for a course in Circle, you can use Content Co-Pilot to do the heavy lifting for you.
To be specific, Content Co-Pilot can help you:
- Generate content ideas
- Create first drafts for your lessons or posts
- Expand your existing content
- Edit, enhance, and improve your posts
- Find data and examples for your content
- Improve the tone and voice of your content
- Write in a specific style
- Create FAQs
- Summarize long articles or blogs
The list can go on and on.
If you’ve used ChatGPT before, think of Content Co-Pilot as the ChatGPT for online community owners and course creators.
It uses the same technology but is more suited to eLearning professionals because it has been specifically trained on data from online communities, courses, digital products, and membership sites.
So, it understands the kind of content community owners and course creators need to engage their audiences, provide value, and answer their questions.
How To Use Content Co-Pilot
Using Community AI’s Content Co-Pilot is pretty straightforward. Let me describe the process step by step.
Step 1: Sign in to your Circle Account
Step 2: Open a lesson or post
Step 3: Type the forward slash in the text editor to open an options dropdown.
Step 4: Choose Co-Pilot
Step 5: Type your prompt. A prompt is an instruction that describes what you want Co-Pilot to do for you.
To make it easier to use, Content Co-Pilot has a list of prompts to create new content.
If you choose “Give me ideas” from the Co-Pilot prompt list, you must describe exactly what you’re looking for.
For example, “Give me ideas….
- about employee engagement activities
- on article topics for the keyword “team building”
- About quiz questions for SEO beginners
Similarly, if you choose “Generate an outline”, you could give Co-Pilot any topic, and it will provide you with a detailed outline for articles, whitepapers, courses, or any other content form.
For example, “Give me an outline…
- For an article on weight loss exercises.
- For an online course on forex investment.
- For a whitepaper on using AI in customer services.
Apart from the listed prompts, you can get creative and ask Co-Pilot different things to see what it is capable of.
Step 6: Once Co-Pilot creates your content, you can use it as it is or enter a prompt like “Continue” or “Expand this” to get a longer draft.
Content Co-Pilot – Examples & Use Cases
As someone who runs multiple online communities, I’m already thinking of so many different ways I can use Co-Pilot to engage my members and strengthen their loyalty to my brand.
Here are some example use cases of Community AI’s Content Co-Pilot.
Share Content Summaries
This is one of my favorite ways to use Content Co-Pilot.
Here’s how it works.
If you’ve published a lengthy article on your blog that you want to share with your community members or have previously sent long messages on a topic, you can ask Co-Pilot to summarize it for your members.
This allows them to consume your content faster without reading the whole thing if they’re in a hurry.
Alternatively, you can take the longer messages from your members and ask Co-Pilot to create a summary for yourself.
Either way, it’s a real time saver that significantly increases your content’s utility.
Create Articles
An everyday use case of Co-Pilot is when you want to write a short article for your community. You can give it the details of your content, like an outline and the core points you want to cover, and Co-Pilot would expand the points into a longer paragraph.
This way, you can ask it to publish multiple paragraphs and turn it into an article you can either expand or post directly in your community.
As a community manager, you can do this for a weekly or daily article and cover different topics for your audience.
Design Quizzes
If you want to make your online courses, coaching programs, and online communities more impactful, design engaging quizzes for your audience.
Why? Because quizzes test your members’ knowledge and force them to consume your content.
With Co-Pilot, you can design quizzes for different skill levels by telling your desired outcome and what you want to evaluate in your learners.
It is one of my favorite ways to use this AI content creator to make my digital products more valuable.
Find New Lesson Ideas
Confused about the content of your course lessons or can’t decide what to include in a module? Ask Co-Pilot for help.
Share your topic with Co-Pilot, and it will give you different course content ideas, including modules and lessons.
You can also use it to restructure your courses, come up with new ideas, and quickly publish course outlines to beat writer’s block and start creating your content.
Publish Lead Magnets
Downloadable lead magnets are an excellent way to generate subscribers and qualify leads based on their interests and behaviors.
With Co-Pilot, you can create PDF resources like checklists, cheat sheets, templates, or short eBooks without spending hours creating content.
Content Co-Pilot Benefits
Circle’s Content Co-Pilot benefits your online community and eLearning business in many ways. Let us explain the most significant ones.
Helps You Beat The Writer’s Block
No more staring at the blank screen for hours, wondering how to draft your next course lesson. With Co-Pilot, you can quickly generate intro paragraphs and first drafts to get your creative juices flowing.
Speeds Up Content Creation
Content Co-Pilot will help you find examples, stats, and case studies to make your content more valuable, saving you hours. From outline creation and writing intro paragraphs to generating content summaries and designing quizzes, Content Co-Pilot will speed up every aspect of your content creation.
Improves Content Quality
Once you create your content draft, ask Co-Pilot to check for typos and spelling mistakes, improve tone and sentence structure, and remove repetitions to make your writing crisper and more impactful.
Drastically Increase Community Engagement
Online community engagement levels directly relate to your content creation speed. By publishing more content in your community and frequently answering your members’ messages, you can quickly build loyalty toward your brand, resulting in more word-of-mouth marketing and referrals.
How Automated Transcriptions Work
Automated transcriptions are another exciting Community AI feature that instantly makes your videos more valuable and drastically increases their reach.
Here’s how it works.
You can upload any video to your Circle community posts or lessons to automatically generate closed captions and transcriptions of your content.
Normally, you’d have to use a premium service to create accurate transcriptions.
But with Community AI, Automated Transcriptions is a part of your package. Plus, since it’s powered by artificial intelligence, the results are remarkably accurate.
So, you’d rarely have to make any edits or changes to your transcripts as long as your videos are audible.
You can also upload custom WebVTT transcripts to replace automated transcriptions or download the automatically generated transcripts to your computer.
Using your uploaded or automatically generated transcriptions, Circle allows your viewers to enable closed captions in your videos, increasing their utility and reach.
How To Use Automated Transcriptions
Here’s the step-by-step process for using Automated Transcriptions in Circle Community AI.
Step 1: Create a new community post or a lesson in Circle.
Step 2: Upload an MP4 video to your post or lesson.
Step 3: Once the video is uploaded, hover your pointer over the top right corner of the video and click the Transcription button.
Step 4: Click the Automated Transcript button to enable it.
Step 5: If you have a custom VTT transcript file on your computer, choose the upload option.
Step 6: Click Save to apply the option you’ve chosen.
Now, when you play your video, Circle will automatically generate a transcript using AI or display your uploaded transcript.
If you’ve chosen Automated Transcripts, you can download them in a VTT file from the same options menu in the Transcript section.
Circle also allows you to embed videos from other websites using their link. But the Automated Transcription feature is not available for embedded videos.
Your community users and course participants can read your video transcripts by clicking the transcript button under the video player.
You can also enable the expanded transcript view.
Your audience can also enable closed captions from the video player once you’ve enabled Automated Transcripts.
In short, you can drastically enhance your video content’s utility by enabling Automated Transcripts in your Circle community and courses.
Automated Transcriptions Examples & Use Cases
Here are some ways to use Automated Transcripts to your advantage.
Video Accessibility
Video transcripts instantly make your videos more accessible to various types of users. For example, a study by Verizon Media found that 69% of internet users watch videos without turning the sound on. Here are their top reasons for doing so.
Without a transcript and captions, you’ll lose most of these viewers, mainly since you publish educational and instructional content.
Similarly, viewers with hearing problems can easily benefit from your content. So, if you’re a coach or an online course creator, adding transcripts widens your audience base and allows you to impact more viewers.
Searchable Video Content
Automated Transcripts make your videos searchable within your Circle community. Without them, a user cannot find the topics you’ve discussed in a video. But with transcripts, Circle also includes video results when a community user searches for a topic. If you have a large number of videos in your community, this feature can significantly increase your content’s reach and help your audience get more value from it.
Translate Content Into Multiple Languages
Community AI supports 20+ major languages in Automated Transcriptions allowing you to offer high-quality content to your audience irrespective of their location and language preferences.
In addition, if your content is in English, you can upload translated transcripts to use the same videos in multiple markets.
Automated Transcription Benefits
Automated Transcripts offer several unique benefits, making your videos more valuable.
Increased Video Engagement
Adding transcripts and closed captions makes your content more engaging and easier to consume for your audiences. A study found that when it comes to instructional content, 80% of the viewers watch a video till the end if it has closed captions.
So, if you want your viewers to watch your content without turning the sound on, give them the option to enable closed captions.
Increased Information Retention
When your videos are without captions and transcripts, they communicate with your audience through visuals and sounds. But a transcript adds another communication point, making it easier for your audience to retain the information from your video.
Many viewers find it easier to take notes from video content when it has a transcript or closed captions.
Enhanced SEO
Adding a video transcript instantly makes your videos more searchable within your Circle community and even when you embed them on your blog or website. Simply copy the transcript and publish it as an article on your blog alongside your video to help search engines index and rank your content for relevant keywords.
Doing this for all your videos can help you open a new traffic source to generate leads for your business.
How Member Activity Scores Work
Keeping your members engaged, rewarding your active members, and reaching out to your inactive or dormant members are among the core tasks of every online community manager.
But it is nearly impossible to gauge member engagement levels without sufficient data and comprehensive automation.
This is where Circle Community AI’s third feature, Member Activity Scores, comes in.
It is an innovative AI-driven engagement algorithm that uses data from thousands of Circle communities to benchmark the desired engagement levels of community members in different industries.
It automatically collects your member activity data for 30 days, compares it against its benchmarks, and gives you a score based on four different engagement KPIs.
These KPIs are:
- Presence: Number of visits per day and number of days visited in the last 30 days.
- Contribution: Number of likes and event RSVPs in the last 30 days.
- Participation: Number of posts and comments in the last 30 days.
- Connection: Number of active DM conversations in the last 30 days.
As you can see, these KPIs cover most aspects of community engagement and give you a pretty accurate picture of your member interest levels. However, you can enable/disable any of these factors from your Activity Score settings if you think they don’t fully apply to your community model.
How To Use Member Activity Scores
Once you enable Member Activity Scores from your Community AI settings, they’re automatically calculated in the background and displayed with your member information.
Only you can view these scores as the community owner or admin. Members can’t see them.
There are a couple of ways you can view Member Activity Scores.
Member Management
Manage members based on their Activity Scores.
Step 1: Click your community logo.
Step 2: Select Members from the menu.
Step 3: Click Add filter and select Activity Score
Step 4: Choose the score range you want to display. For example, show members with activity scores below 10.
Member Profiles
You can also view Activity Scores in every member profile. Open any profile and go to the About tab to view the Activity Score.
You won’t see the Activity Score for members who’ve been a part of your community for less than 30 days. After 30 days, their scores will be automatically updated.
Member Activity Score Examples & Use Cases
Knowing what your members think about your community opens up numerous ways to grow your business and offer more value. Here are a few ideas.
Create Tailored Offers
You can tailor different product offers, discounts, and content campaigns depending on your member activity scores. For example, you can launch upsells or dedicated products for members with the highest Activity Scores since they’re your most engaged members.
Similarly, you can launch reengagement campaigns, webinars, or offers to bring your disengaged members back.
Design Automated Workflows
You can create automated email campaigns for members with different Activity Scores. For example, as soon as a member’s score goes under 30, you can trigger an email campaign that asks them about their problems, why they’re not active, what they expect from the community, and how you can improve their experience.
Similarly, the moment a member’s score goes beyond 80, you can push a special offer, one on one coaching plan, or any other product that solves their problems.
Reward Members
Automatically tag members based on their Activity Scores, acknowledge them in your community, and offer them special rewards like free product upgrades, live session invites, or discount coupons.
Member Activity Score Benefits
Member Activity Scores offer several benefits for your online community business.
Deeper User Insights
You get much deeper user insights benchmarked against industry standards and beyond the usual surface-level stats you get with most community platforms. Plus, these stats are updated every 30 days, giving you an updated picture of the state of your online community and how you should improve it.
Better Segmentation
With Activity Scores, you can efficiently segment your members and create unique strategies to address their problems. You can also use this score as a filter for your product launches and consider it when developing your content strategy.
More Effective Communication
When you know the specific issues and problems of your members, you can design more targeted email and messaging campaigns to drive higher conversions.
Circle Community AI Pricing & Free Trial
Community AI is available in Circle’s Business and higher plans. So, the members of the Basic or Professional plans can’t use it.
The Business plan starts from $219/month but offers a discounted rate of $199/month if you pay annually.
If you’re running an established brand with a large online community, consider Circle’s Enterprise Plan, available at $399/month or $360/month paid annually.
All Circle Plans come with a 14-day free trial and do not require a credit card. So, you can test its features before deciding if it’s the right solution for your business.
Circle Community AI Pros And Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| All Community AI tools are trained on extensive online community data to provide a tailored experience. | Community AI is still in beta and is not a finished product. So, you can expect inaccuracies in its responses. |
| All tools are easy to use and offer an excellent user experience. | It is only available to Circle’s Business and Enterprise users. |
| Enabling/disabling Community AI features is pretty seamless and is already integrated with the regular community features. |
Is Community AI Worth Using For Content Creators?
Community AI is certainly an impressive addition to Circle’s already robust online community platform. It not only speeds up your content creation but also provides you with audience insights to design more polished community content.
However, its steep pricing only makes it worth the investment if you have a large community that requires active Ai tools for management.
For beginners and smaller community owners, it might not be a feasible investment.
Jeff Cobb, Founder of Learning Revolution
Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business. Learn more about Jeff Cobb here.
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