Helping others is pivotal to the well-being of ourselves and others. It’s a practice that rewards both intrinsically and extrinsically and that has the power to change lives for the better.
While contributing to your community is one of the best things you can do with your time, it isn’t always easy to know where to start, or how to make sure you are having the most impact possible.
Here are some tips to get most from your community
1. Crowd-Sourced Solutions
There’s an art to asking for a referral from a member of your community, but think about it like this:
You are an expert, as are the people on your staff, but there are also experts within your online following that can also provide assistance and solutions. Many of them would be happy to do so! If you have any particular questions or issues that seem to appear more often than not, try asking experts in your community to weigh in on this process:
- Pose the question on your social media channels
- Compile the accurate answers
- Write a round-up style blog post and give credit to those who helped out.
2. Engage Your Community in Real Time
When a breaking news story hits, we often scramble to produce something before the opportunity to capitalize on the trending topic is gone. Using a tool like Storify, you can quickly curate trending news and post within the heat of the moment.
You can also use moments like these to source additional content from the community. Much like the point above, these responses work great in a post where you highlight the most insightful comments.
For 51% of brands, creating real-time engagement is their largest challenge. Here are some ways to create this type of engagement for your brand:
- Ask for your community’s opinion on hot-button topics
- Encourage people to share photos from events or business gatherings associated with your brand.
- Announce an upcoming deadline for your company and let your community know how they can help.
3. Harness The Hashtag
While it was born on Twitter, the hashtag is spreading to other platforms like Instagram as well. This method of categorizing posts and tweets offers you the ability to join and involve your community in any conversation taking place in real time.
It could be a hashtag related to an event or news story, but utilizing it in your tweets, and retweeting other messages within the same conversation will allow you to not participate and monitor the developments.
Retweeting your community’s messages offers another avenue for involving them in the content creation process as you can also curate these tweets into a future post on your blog.
4. Show Interest in Their Opinions (Ask for Feedback)
Sometimes, all it takes is the right question in the right place to immediately involve your community in your content marketing. Social media, newsletters, surveys, these are all touch points you can utilize to engage your audience members.
When you have their attention, ask questions that show an interest in their opinions and values, like these:
- How can we improve in the coming year?
- What do you like most about our product/service?
- Where is your dream vacation?
- What are your new year’s resolutions?
As said about this, now it comes to the part where you have to focus more that’s where many fail.
Share your thoughts in the comments.