10 tips to build a highly engaged community on social media

In MARKETING
5 October 2023
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Today, social media play a crucial role in creating a community around your brand. Companies need not only to be present on these platforms, but also to be active on them to attract the attention of potential customers. In this article, we’ll look at different strategies for creating and maintaining a community around your brand on social networks.

How to create a community on social media?

  1. Define your target audience: to start with, it’s crucial to know who you’re targeting. Determine your target audience by analyzing the demographics, search habits and online behaviors of your current and potential customers. This will help you create targeted content that resonates with your audience.
  2. Create compelling content: once you’ve defined your target audience, create compelling content that meets their needs. Use high-quality images and videos to engage your audience. Don’t forget to post regularly to maintain engagement.
  3. Use relevant hashtags: hashtags are a great way to get your brand noticed on social media. Use hashtags relevant to your industry and your posts to reach a wider audience.
  4. Encourage interaction: encourage your followers to comment, like and share your content. Ask questions to spark conversations, and respond quickly to comments to show you’re engaged with your community.
  5. Run contests and offer exclusive deals: contests and exclusive deals are a great way to boost engagement and retain your community. Offer rewards that are linked to your brand to encourage sharing and interaction.

How do you get your community to engage with your content on social media?

  1. Respond to comments and direct messages: it’s important to be attentive to comments and direct messages from your community. Responding quickly and personally shows that you’re engaged with your audience.
  2. Use polls and questionnaires: polls and questionnaires are a great way to engage your community and get valuable feedback on your brand. Ask questions that are relevant to your business and use the results to improve your products or services.
  3. Collaborate with influencers: influencers can help expand your reach on social media by sharing your content with their own communities. Seek out influencers relevant to your industry and collaborate with them to reach a wider audience.
  4. Organize online events: online events, such as webinars or live chats, are a great way to engage your community in real time. Offer valuable content and create a space for discussion to encourage engagement.
  5. Monitor trends: stay abreast of trends and events relevant to your industry. Use this information to create content and engage your community around topics that are relevant to them.

Conclusion

Creating and engaging a community around your brand on social media takes time and effort. By following these tips, you can attract the attention of your target audience and build lasting relationships with them. Be patient and persistent, and you’ll see long-term results for your business.

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How to promote content with LinkedIn

In MARKETING
24 February 2022

The Digital Publisher’s Guide to Social Media

Thanks to social media, delivering content to thousands of people at once is as easy as hitting the “Post” button. But it isn’t always easy to achieve the results you have in mind. That’s why we’re bringing you a new series all about making these channels work for your digital publishing needs. Next up: how to promote content with LinkedIn.

Why use LinkedIn to promote content?

If you think of LinkedIn mostly as a place to look for job openings, think again. Over the past several years, the social network built for professionals has added lots of new features and tools designed for content. Although it’s not the biggest social platform, LinkedIn’s 810 million users represent a particularly valuable audience of executives, entrepreneurs and employees.

As a result, LinkedIn has become a key channel for distributing B2B digital content. In other words, businesses that sell their products or services to other businesses want to be seen in LinkedIn Feeds. In fact, it’s the #1 social media network for B2B marketers with a content strategy. A recent study found that 95% said they published non-sponsored posts on LinkedIn. (More focused on B2C? Keep reading—B2C marketers use the platform, too.)

Since 30 million companies have joined LinkedIn, the importance of B2B influencers has exploded. Also called “thought leaders,” these users can attract big audiences to their reflections on trends, tools and ideas in business. Consider how your digital publications, from brochures to white papers, can help your company join the conversation and reach the right readers. Then, get ready to promote content with LinkedIn.

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Choose the right format

The first choice you’ll need to make when posting your content to LinkedIn is what format to use. Because LinkedIn offers different options than most other social platforms, this can be a little more complicated than usual. For example, personal profiles and business pages don’t have the same posting possibilities.

If you’re posting from a business page to promote content with LinkedIn, you’ll have three main choices. You can create a classic Link post, an Image post or a Document post.

Link post

  • A Link post is great for sharing important sales and lead generation content, like your professional digital publications on Calaméo. Whether embedded on a landing page or ready to browse in our full-screen viewer, your publications can benefit from readers coming from LinkedIn.

Image post

  • An Image post will contain a featured .jpg or .png file, plus your message. To achieve an Image look while still including a link in your update, first enter the post text and link. Then, LinkedIn will pull a selection of images from your link to use in your post. Choose the image you prefer and hit Post!

Document post

  • A Document post allows you to publish an entire PDF file within a LinkedIn update. Readers will be able to view your document without ever leaving their feeds, which means you can share more complex content directly in the Feed.

If you’re posting from a personal profile, you also have access to LinkedIn’s Articles feature. The Articles format is similar to a blog post: longer than the messages that accompany Link, Image and Document posts, but more limited in scope than a digital publication.

In short, the post format that works best for you will depend on why you want to promote content with LinkedIn. For instance, Articles and Image posts might help you find new followers and build an audience on the platform. However, Link posts to your digital publications may be most effective for nurturing prospects and gaining customers.

LinkedIn Learning icon

Optimize your message

In addition to its professional user base, marketers love LinkedIn for its generally high engagement rates for organic posts. You should expect to see 1-2% of the people who see your update to comment, click, react or share. Meanwhile, engagement rates on Facebook and Twitter are only about half of that: 0.50% to 1%.

What’s more, LinkedIn has been open about the factors that make a post likely to get better reach. Above all, engagement matters. Getting your followers—and their followers!—to respond to your posts is the key factor to effectively promote content with LinkedIn.

So what can you do in concrete terms to encourage engagement? There are lots of ideas out there, but the most common advice is to focus on your post text. For every type of post format, you’ll be able to include a message of up to 700 characters. Use that space to speak to your audience! Explain why they should click, ask what they think, tell them a story about your content. To finish, add a few well-chosen hashtags to make your post easier to discover.

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Watch for conversions

Once you’ve started sharing on LinkedIn, you can begin to evaluate the kinds of content that you’d most like to emphasize. For many B2B oriented companies, online content marketing with guides, case studies, white papers and more has become an important way to find new customers. And you’ll want to know how well these digital publications are performing.

LinkedIn provides a number of useful statistics about your updates, which are visible to company Page Administrators in their Analytics tab. Besides gaining valuable insights into your audience, you can check the reach, clicks and overall engagement rate of your posts. Unfortunately, there are no more specific details available about the digital publications that you’ve shared. In other words, even Document posts won’t have data about publication views.

Therefore, you can get the best out of both worlds when you promote content with LinkedIn that is part of your sales and marketing strategy. Create a post about a digital publication embedded on your website, where a pop-up form can generate leads. Or enrich your business’s catalogue with Shopping links, then share to support sales. Your digital publications on Calaméo come with advanced statistics that help you dig deeper into audience engagement.   

Ready to start?

Now that you’ve got all the details about how to promote content with LinkedIn, it’s time to turn your online documents into great digital publications. Sign up for your free Calaméo account today and explore what digital publishing can do for you!

MARKETING

Content creation: 5 key trends for 2024

In MARKETING
4 January 2024

At the end of 2023, whether on Facebook, Linkedin or Instagram, many brands (and influencers) have noticed a drop in reach and engagement on their social media. A consequence of channels saturated by the amount of content published every minute. So what kind of content should be created in 2024 to keep communicating effectively? Follow the 5 key trends we’ll be presenting in this article to help you overcome the decline in your social media metrics.

1. Dark social

In 2024, it’s important to offer content that can be shared privately. To do this, your content needs to be so well matched to your target audience, that they’ll share it with their acquaintances in a private message.

You can also offer private experiences between your brand and its customers, such as exclusive groups or private discussion channels.

💡Read more on dark social and Calaméo.

2. Video

Video is still king. But by 2024, vertical videos are expected to be longer, lasting several minutes. Note, however, that even longer videos need to be well-paced. Internet users must have no time to get bored.

💡TIP: Use these formats preferably in 2024: stories, vertical videos and live broadcasts.

3. Useful content

Whether to inspire or to inform, content must be of real use to the viewer. Empty or narcissistic content is no longer interesting. You need to offer content with high added value if you want Internet users to be interested in your brand. Don’t talk about yourself, talk about your audience: their needs, their expectations, and offer them content that inspires or educates them.

💡 TIP: To create content that’s useful to your audience, you first need to clearly define your target.

4. Entertaining content

The other type of content you can offer your audience to improve your reach is entertaining content. Choosing the angle of entertainment and humor is an excellent idea in 2024 since “making people laugh” or “entertaining people” means creating an emotional bond with your audience, who will be able to remember this when choosing between you and your competitors.

💡 TIP: Be careful, not all types of humor and entertainment will suit your brand, or your target, it’s up to you to find the one that fits.

5. User-generated content (UGC)

This latest type of trendy content underlines the need for authenticity. With UGC, the consumer speaks directly to the audience. And what better way to convince a consumer than with the opinion of another consumer? Content of this type allows you to play on your audience’s identification with the creator of the UGC.

💡 TIP: There are now many freelancers specializing in UGC creation.

Conclusion

It seems clear that the basis of content trends for 2024 is the same: it’s all about knowing your target audience. With a clear idea of your target, it will be very easy for your brand to create useful, entertaining and shareable content to boost your social networks.

💡Re-read 2023’s key content trends.