An online community is a group with shared interests on any topic you can imagine, whether it’s personal finance, sewing, or pet photography. These communities exist on forums, social media, or an actual website. Your community is the perfect place to share advice or just chat about relevant topics, but it’s also a great way to find and share content. It’s a no-brainer since you already know the content matches your area of interest.
Also, if you share stuff from your community friends, it’s mutually beneficial. Their content gets more exposure, you have more content to share without having to create your own, and your friends will be more likely to share your stuff in return!
So how do you find the best content from your community? Here’s a guide to get you started.
Find The Right Members
If you want to find great content in your community, first you need to attract the right members to your clan! Look for experts in your niche who can add real value to the community.
The hard part can be getting people interested in joining. Here are some ways to grow your community:
- Invite new people. Sounds obvious, right? However, you should take the time to build a relationship with them first and even offer them some freebies. This could be free advice, one of your ebooks, or a personalized group within your community exclusively for their readers.
- Ask existing members to invite their friends. You can offer some incentives if they get a certain amount of friends to join as a motivator.
- See if any members are willing to be recruiters. The best promoters of your community are members who already love it!
- Interview a community member or ask them for a quote for your article. They’ll be more likely to ask their friends to check out the content and share it.
Find The Right Content
Now that you’ve got some new members, here’s how to find and share the best content from your community. These are some awesome tools to get you going!
Mention
Mention allows you to monitor over 1 billion sources such as blogs, forums, news sites, etc. Specifically, you can monitor relevant topics and also use the results to find new community members, along with other topics those members might be interested in.
Facebook Groups and Pages
Most Facebook Groups are targeted at a specific niche, so chances are the members of these groups would also be interested in your community of the same niche. You can also look for content that members are sharing within these groups. You can also follow Facebook Pages of top bloggers in your niche so you’ll know when they share new content.
Reddit contains tons of niche communities, called subreddits. These subreddit communities are moderated by members and have set rules, which helps ensure the content is relevant and useful. Within any subreddit, you can sort content by top, hot, new, and rising content, which makes your search much easier.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo allows you to easily find top content when you search for specific keywords relevant to your community. The app shows you which posts have the most Facebook engagement, Twitter shares, Pinterest shares, etc. You can also view backlinks from other blogs to that post.
Community Sharer
Community Sharer automates sharing the best content from your community. All you need to do is have community members add their sites. Every few hours, Community Sharer automatically checks all the sites in your community for new posts and adds them to your Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest feed. Doesn’t get any easier than that!
Share the Best Stuff
Sharing great content from your community is a win-win! Your members will appreciate getting more exposure and in turn, they’ll spread the word about your site. You’ll have high-quality content to share on your site without having to put the hard work in creating it yourself. So let’s get sharing!