Good gravy. Am I preparing to launch a spaceship or book? Lately it's been kind of hard to tell.
Networking with communities has turned into a massive, repetitive time suck and I'm determined to make it fun again! Here's what I've started doing.
I'm in the early stages of marketing for my upcoming marketing book.
It's all about how to optimize your marketing activities by making them reusable for other departments with automated workflows, so I figured I should walk my own talk and simplify my marketing.
Community engagement is super important for any kind of publicity campaign to work well, especially when your product is content. Being the sloth that I am, this tends to consume way more time than I'd like to admit.
But you know what? Being a sloth is okay if your food comes to you and aren't trying to cross a busy road. A weird metaphor to explain why you should centralize content, but you get the gist.
The point is that when you can automate the time-consuming processes you need to do, you spend less time on them while simultaneously increasing their value. And you can even do that with your community engagement.
Here are 3 Simple Tactics to Automatically Bring Your Community to You
Here are 3 Simple Tactics to Automatically Bring Your Community to You
1. Source content with feed readers
I recently started using Feedly. I have two folders: Business and Technology and I search for blogs and news sites in my niche and add them to my feed folders. Feedly pulls these posts by the RSS feeds they've been added to. So when I want relevant, helpful content to share on LinkedIn or Twitter, I browse my feeds and choose content from there.
It's a huge time saver for both my content marketing and my professional development. I learn so much more from my peers this way!
Want to improve your site's RSS feed? I explained how I customized my site's RSS feed in a recent Medium post.
2. Make a private list in Twitter
When I discover or find people in my industry whose Tweets are consistent with the messages I want to share and the community I want to engage, I add it to my Private list. When I want to engage on Twitter, instead of scrolling endlessly through my home feed for suitable content, I scroll through the feeds of my private list.
This is not only great for sourcing on-topic content, but it's rad for networking with people in your industry. And it's simple to modify. If someone isn't responding to your engagement with them and you see there's no value there, all you have to do is remove them from your list.
3. Bookmark!
We've all been there. You're passing time browsing a site or an app while you're waiting for a phone call or an appointment.
I regularly come across articles, blog posts, podcasts, webinars, social media posts and other content when it's not a good time for me to create a social media post. So I just bookmark it for later.
Most platforms have a bookmarking feature. Look for the hanging flag symbol. That's much easier opening a social media post in a browser so you can bookmark it there.
You won't miss a thread you should be engaging with again. No more browsing through your history to try to find things again.
Want a custom RSS feed for your site? I wrote a post on that on Medium!