6 Types of Featured Content to Promote To Your Community (And Often)

March 25, 2022

6 Types of Featured Content to Promote To Your Community (And Often)

Woman shouting into a megaphone

Successful community building is about consistently engaging your audience. 

You want to strengthen relationships between customer and brand by demonstrating value and understanding. In turn, this will help you build trust, authority and credibility within your space. 

Sounds easy, right?

And the truth is that it can be, providing you know a thing or two about your audience’s habits and behaviours.

That’s because successful community engagement requires you to know what content your audience demands and, as a result, what content you should be shouting about the most loudly.

In this post, we’re exploring 6 types of content always worth promoting to your audience.

Internal news 

Your brand is the heart of your community. It’s the hub your audience is built around and the driving force for its growth.

Keeping your community informed on all of your latest internal news and developments will put your brand front and centre.

Not only will this help to strengthen your brand’s authenticity (a trait that 90% of consumers agree is important), but it will also make your community members feel more valued. 

Giving your audience extra insight into your brand will make them feel less like consumers and more like community members, bridging the gap between you and your audience. 

This can create authentic brand ambassadors – an asset 89% of marketers agree is effective in growing a community.

Shouting loudly about your internal news also provides a distinct opportunity to demonstrate how you’re embracing your brand values.

Not only will this further strengthen your authenticity, but it will also help audiences to identify with your brand (growing your community as a result!).

External news 

Promoting external news is also a powerful way of engaging your community.

From important updates within your industry to current affairs that align (or contrast) with your brand’s values, share external news to position yourself at the forefront of your space.

Be sure you’re adding something new to the conversation, though.

The point is to demonstrate your expertise by providing valuable insights, opinions and solutions as a means of strengthening your brand’s authority and your community’s trust in it. 

Be sure this content is being produced and promoted with a quick turnaround – external news is rarely evergreen, so you need to participate in the conversation while it’s still happening. 

Providing you shout about it loudly, this finger-on-the-pulse content will likely drive plenty of engagement and conversation within your community.

Polls

Community members like to be heard – in fact, a significant 89% of consumers want companies to ask them for input.

Polls can be a great way of collecting audience opinions. 

Firstly, they give community members the chance for their voices to be heard without having to spend time on exhaustive forms and laboured feedback.

Secondly, polls are interactive and visually engaging, allowing them to drive active participation.

The benefits here are crystal clear. Your community relations will be strengthened by your members feeling valued and heard, which, in turn, builds greater trust in your brand.

Oh, and all the while, you’re collecting valuable audience feedback and insight that can be utilised to further enhance how your brand connects with its community.

Of course, all of these perks rely on your community actually engaging with your polls – so be sure your audience knows every time one goes live.

Resources 

If your brand community is growing, it’s likely you’re creating customer-first content. 

These resources provide your audience with solutions to common pain points, and can take the form of blog posts, ebooks, guides and more.

This content is driven directly by the needs of your audience and, as such, tends to generate meaningful engagement.

As long as these resources provide high-quality and high-value solutions, they’ll prove invaluable in asserting your brand’s expertise and authority.

It’s the reason 92% of marketers agree that their company views content as a business asset.

If you’ve taken the time to create customer-first resources, be sure to seize the opportunity for engagement by ensuring your audience knows where to find them.

Social posts  

Your brand’s socials are likely your go-to promotion channels. 

As a result, shouting about your social channels and your social posts can often be a long-forgotten afterthought.

This means there’s untapped potential for you to build a greater social following that helps to widen your reach and grow your community.

With this in mind, be sure to wax lyrical about your most-used platforms. Go further than merely linking your social icons in the footer of your website, though. 

Instead, directly promote your best-performing posts by integrating feeds across multiple platforms and channels.

With over 53% of the world’s population on social media, ensuring a strong social presence is key to asserting brand authority and trust. 

With this in mind, be sure to capitalise on your existing community by shouting about your socials to ensure a consistent and enthusiastic following wherever your brand’s visible online. 

Promotions 

We don’t need to tell you about the power of promotions. 

From unmissable perks to exclusive discounts, providing users with incentives to engage is a sure-fire way of keeping your community active.

Shout loudly and proudly whenever you’re running a promotion to stir up a healthy amount of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Remember: 69% of millennials experience FOMO, with the emotion driving purchasing decisions in a significant 48% of this demographic.

Make sure you’re highlighting active promotions to maximise the success of your offer and improve your community engagement to boot.

Successful and sustainable community building means consistently meeting the wants, needs and desires of your audience. With this in mind, don’t fall at the final hurdle by failing to promote what matters most to your brand and, of course, your community.

On the Six Circles community engagement platform, our latest update has given small and large business owners more community-building power than ever before. 

For example, our new featured tiles panel allows admins to pin important content (like the types mentioned in this post) so it’s the first thing users see when they arrive on the platform. Want to learn more? Get in touch today to find out how Six Circles can help your community building go further.

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