Giving your followers a place for community and connection promotes a sense of belonging amongst your readership. When you use social media to build that community, your audience are much more likely to stay engaged and avoid jumping onto the next thing.

Here are our top 3 ways for you to boost your social media engagement and build that buzzing community around your content.

Understand Your Audience

While each social media platform has unique benefits, the fundamental rule to follow is to be where your audience is. This helps to keep you focused on just the social media platforms that matter without spreading your resources too thin so you can deliver an impactful social media strategy to your community.

Another part of understanding your audience is knowing what content resonates with them and that they like to engage with. To do this, you can use analytics and insights to see what content is performing well in terms of comments, shares and likes. From here, you can tweak and change your strategy to engage your audience with every post.

Tailor To Your Audience

Creating a community on social media where your audience feels heard is key — so simply posting links to your recent articles isn’t enough. Share social-specific content that aims to start conversations with your audience, ask questions, and get to know them.

New Scientist demonstrates this perfectly with their ‘puzzle’ post on their Twitter feed. It’s a great way to break up the article content while encouraging their audience to engage and solve the puzzle.

You also need to be tailoring your content to audiences across different platforms; posting exactly the same message across platforms won’t engage everyone everywhere. As an example, LinkedIn audiences tend to be more professional and engage with longer form content, whereas Twitter audiences are much more conversational, with character limits making all content short-form!

Speak To Your Audience

Social media is called ‘social’ for a reason — your audience wants to connect and engage with real people, not just an organisation as a whole. Bring your brand’s personality out on social media and show the people behind your accounts to drive that human connection and engagement.

For example, White Light Media are always sharing content around their team, whether it’s for promotions or awards — showing the amazing people behind the brand.

Other ways you could speak directly to your audience and generate that valuable engagement is to share user-generated content about articles they’re loving, or their perspectives on stories you’ve covered.

By providing a platform for your community to connect and engage with you on social media, not only can you improve member retention rates but you can also get a clear idea of what your audience wants to see from your organisation, making them feel heard and valued.

CrowdControlHQ is sponsor of the PPA Leadership Summit 2021. Through our powerful platform and partnership approach, we put you in the driving seat to unlock the full business potential of social media.

We’re offering PPA members an exclusive 15-minute social media health check to help you uncover opportunities and efficiencies with your social media efforts, with no obligation. Get in touch today if you are interested to learn more.