#TipTuesday: How to cross-promote / externally promote your community

Rhys

Promoting an online community effectively requires a strategic approach to reach new audiences and engage existing members. Some key strategies to cross-promote and externally promote your online community are as follows. 

Leverage Social Media Platforms

Social media is a powerful tool for promoting online communities. Every page in Vanilla has a unique URL, making is easy to share engaging content from your community on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Use eye-catching visuals, hashtags, and interactive posts to draw attention and encourage sharing among your followers.

Use Content Marketing

Create high-quality content that resonates with your target audience. This could include blog posts, videos, podcasts, or infographics related to your community's interests. Share this content on your website and other platforms to drive traffic back to your community.

Utilize Vanilla's Email Digest

Encourage your users to subscribe to the weekly email digest to keep your audience informed about community updates, popular discussions, and upcoming events.  The Vanilla Email Digest feature automatically sends weekly email messages of "personalized content" to subscribers in your community. The digest contains summaries of, and links to community posts from the prior week.

Host Webinars and Virtual Events

Organize webinars, live Q&A sessions, etc. to provide value to your community members. Vanilla's Events feature enables you to create events to showcase in your community's categories and/or groups, making it perfect for spreading the word about your organization's upcoming events.

Implement SEO Strategies

Optimize your community for search engines by using relevant keywords, using content relevant post titles. Vanilla uses industry standard, vetted principles to improve the discoverability of your site and its content, including alt tags, auto generated meta-descriptions and structured data. 

Encourage Member Advocacy

Encourage your existing members to become advocates for your community. Encourage them to share their experiences and invite others to join. Use gamification to encourage user participation, creating a positive feeling in your community

Promote from within

Make sure your community is prominently advertised on your main website. Add email footers (signatures) to outgoing emails of anyone customer focused at your organisation. Encourage your CSMs to chat about the community when they have calls with their customers, making sure the customers know about the resource.

 

By employing these strategies, you can effectively cross-promote and externally promote your online community, fostering growth and increased engagement.