What are the latest social media trends for community building and retention?

2 Live streaming

Live streaming is another trend that has gained popularity and relevance in the past year, as more people seek real-time connection and communication online. Live streaming allows you to showcase your brand's personality, behind-the-scenes, and expertise, as well as to interact with your community in a more direct and personal way. Live streaming can also help you increase your reach, engagement, and retention, as people tend to watch live videos longer and more attentively than recorded ones. To make the most of live streaming, you can plan ahead, promote your sessions, invite guests or influencers, ask questions, answer comments, and repurpose your content for other platforms.

3 Social listening

Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing what people are saying about your brand, industry, competitors, or topics of interest on social media. Social listening can help you understand your audience's needs, preferences, opinions, and pain points, as well as to identify trends, opportunities, threats, and gaps in the market. Social listening can also help you improve your community building and retention, as you can use the insights to create more relevant and valuable content, respond to feedback, address issues, join conversations, and build relationships. To practice social listening, you can use tools, keywords, hashtags, or mentions to track and measure the online sentiment and conversations around your brand.

4 Social commerce

Social commerce is the integration of e-commerce and social media, allowing users to discover, browse, and purchase products or services directly on social platforms. Social commerce can help you increase your sales, conversions, and retention, as you can reduce the friction and steps in the customer journey, and offer a more seamless and convenient shopping experience. Social commerce can also help you enhance your community building, as you can showcase your products or services in a more engaging and interactive way, and leverage social proof, reviews, or referrals from your audience. To optimize your social commerce, you can use features, tools, or platforms that enable shoppable posts, stories, videos, or live streams.

5 Content diversification

Content diversification is the strategy of creating and distributing different types of content across multiple platforms and formats, to reach and attract a wider and more diverse audience. Content diversification can help you improve your community building and retention, as you can cater to different preferences, needs, and behaviors, and offer more value, variety, and relevance to your audience. Content diversification can also help you increase your visibility, reach, and authority, as you can leverage the algorithms, features, and trends of each platform, and position yourself as a leader and expert in your industry. To diversify your content, you can use formats such as blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics, ebooks, webinars, or newsletters, and platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Medium.