If you’re here, you probably don’t need me to tell you what Beamer does to help increase engagement with your users. Not just for sharing news and all sort of updates but also to get useful feedback from your readers. If you’re not using Beamer, you can start right now, but if you do you may be asking yourself: How can I get the most out of it? How can I get more engagement with my posts, news, and updates? Keep on reading…
Here are the top 5 tips to get more engagement from your Beamer posts:
Make your post pop with images and GIFs.
Images are the best way to catch your user’s attention. Posts with images have 30% more CTR (Click Through Rate) than those without them. Visual media is one of the most popular content delivery methods, and the undisputed king of social media (after all, we live in the era of the meme). People remember more visually than in any other way, especially if images are involved.
So how can you tap the power of visuals to improve your posts? With Beamer, you can easily upload, select, and place pictures directly from the post editor with just a few clicks. Go to your dashboard, jump to the editor, click on the plus icon, and select the upload image option. The rest is just picking the right image and placing it wherever you prefer.
Create customized thumbnails for your updates, share screenshots of your product, or pick an attention-grabbing photo to make any post stand out among the vast sea of information. Try always to use images that are simple to understand, colorful, lively, and related to the content. Be deliberate and daring! People upload more than 45,000 photos to Instagram every minute and more than 300 million to Facebook every day. You are competing not just with the incredible amount of text on the internet but with an ever-increasing gallery of images. Your thumbnails need to be interesting enough to make your users stop for a second to read, but also to communicate what your post is trying to convey. Tell stories visually.
But don’t stop there. Beamer also supports gifs that can imbue life into your posts. Your users will be more likely to stop scrolling if they see movement (like the T-rex from Jurassic Park ?). You don’t need to host your gifs in a whole separate service or install a plugin. Just upload them like any other image and start getting your extra clicks. A picture is worth a thousand words, so maybe a gif is worth a thousand images.
Summarize your content with a video.
If you need to communicate complex topics, share in-depth tutorials, or show your latest ad, you can always count with a video. We have known for a time that video is one of the most engaging kinds of content online. Facebook has embraced them fully by now. Video is beloved by both marketers and consumers, and a positive video experience increases purchase probabilities. Beamer has integrations with Youtube, Wistia, Vidyard, Vimeo, Instagram, and more than a hundred other third-party apps and services. You don’t need to bother with embed codes or external links. Just copy the URL, select the embed option, and paste it directly in the editor. Beamer will handle the rest. The system will recognize the video and show it directly in your feed, without sending your users to another platform, retaining the viewers in your timeline.
Video, image, and gif support are all features included in all of Beamer’s plans. You can start sharing your content for free right now.
Bring your users back for more.
We are not always online, and on many occasions, your users will not be on your site or app to see your updates directly. Don’t lose those views! Use push notifications to reach your users even if they’re offline and bring them back to your content. Be specific! You don’t need to send the same notification to all of your users. You can use segmentation to target users by location, role, payment plan, language, behavior, shopping history, favorite sports team, or whatever data you’re tracking. Use these filters to notify your users about updates that you are confident they will be interested in reading.
To make them subscribe to your notifications, you can customize your opt-in prompts with your logo and choose where to show them the invitation. Instead of spending long hours trying to set up a notification system, let Beamer work its magic.
Pick the best time to launch.
What is the best time to share a post? Maybe by now, you have checked your analytics and already know. Beamer lets you time travel. Publish your posts in the past or schedule them for the future. Pick the best time of the day to reach your audience and get your work done in advance. You can cook multiple posts and set different times to launch them. That way, you can concentrate on the hours your users are more active, making sure they won’t lose any news.
If you have a limited time offer or you don’t want to get your feed too crowded with information that will be outdated soon, you can set expiration dates. Don’t just travel back or forward in time; take full control of when and for how long your posts will be accessible to your user base.
I know Beamer is not a real time-machine (sadly we’ll have to wait for one of those), but having time to prepare will help you to craft better content, cash in on the times of high traffic, and devise more accurate ways to target posts to your users’ interests. Planning is everything.
Make your brand consistent.
Regardless of which kind of site, SaaS, or e-commerce you manage, you have a brand, and you probably take good care of how your site looks. Beamer is designed to be flexible and fit with any environment. Maybe you are using third-party apps or services like external authentication, customer service chats, or social sharing plugins. Many of those services may seem out of place with your UI or make your users feel they are leaving your site. Beamer knows how vital brand consistency is for you and your users and provides different ways to keep you on-brand.
You can change your widget’s appearance directly from your dashboard. Add your logo, change the font-size, and pick your colors by changing the HEX values. No coding skill required.
If you want to go further and you are a little more tech-savvy, you can use personalized CSS code. Just copy your code and paste it in the Custom CSS section to take full control of your widget’s appearance. If you need help with that, I wrote a tutorial with some recommendations. You can also integrate Beamer directly in your UI. Make it blend with your site branding by creating a customized trigger. That means that instead of the floating button that alerts your users of new posts, you can make an element in your site to perform that function. There’s another tutorial that can help you with that.
All Beamer accounts come with a standalone release notes page where you can showcase all your latest updates in a more public way. The default address is getbeamer.com/yourname (you can change the name part but not the domain), but with the Custom Domain feature you can pick a fully personalized domain or subdomain (e.g. updates.yoursite.com). Make your users feel at home by giving Beamer an address that fits with your brand. You can request it directly from your dashboard and get it working in no time.
Apply these changes to your Beamer widget and your posting habits, and you’ll see an improvement in user interaction. Small changes and proper use of the many tools that Beamer provides can make the difference between simple visitors and an engaged and loyal audience.
If after reading all of this you’re still unsure if Beamer suits your needs, why not taking it for a spin? Create a free account today and start posting.
