Keep Your Audience Engaged During a Hiatus

We all need a break. Taking a break can be absolutely beneficial to your business. Whether you’re a solopreneur taking a breather or an employee taking PTO, breaks can be healthy. Sometimes, however, too long of a hiatus can cause engagement from your audience to fall. Luckily, digital media offers a number of tools you can use to keep your audience engaged. Here’s how to keep your audience engaged during a publishing hiatus

Don’t stop posting

We can’t stress the importance of keeping a regular posting schedule enough. Consider it the bare minimum—as long as your audience sees your brand name and some form of content on a regular basis, they’ll stay interested. That’s why creating evergreen content for your brand is important. What you post is just as important as how often. Social media can help to highlight some of your best editorial or creative pieces. It can be especially powerful for helping you bring to light some lesser-read pieces as well. exclusive content can more effectively drive engagement. Issuu Stories can help you create evergreen social content from your pre-existing publications to keep your channels running smoothly.

There are a number of automation tools you can use to help you post regularly. Automation is helpful to keep your audience engaged because you can schedule in bulk, and release on your own timeline. Start with an automation tool like Hootsuite or SproutSocial. Your typical blogging and web platforms also have automation tools to keep your web content moving when you’re on the move. 

The beauty of social media sites is that while the content has to be thoughtful, it doesn’t have to be at all extensive. All it takes is a picture, a sentence, and maybe some hashtags. If you’re planning a hiatus, we’d recommend budgeting in and lining up social media posts while you’re still working. They can be done rather quickly, and planning them out in advance helps you balance your content later down the road.

Ready to learn more on keeping your audience engaged during a hiatus? Let’s figure out the engaging part next.

Related Reading: What is evergreen content?

Engage them directly

The best way to drive audience engagement? Engage them directly! Use copy to ask your followers to comment or discuss something, or by asking them a thought-provoking question related to your content. This way, you get your audience involved in your editorial world. This can all be done remotely and in advance, as long as you have your content pre-planned. Not only will this keep your audience interested, but it’ll also help involve them more with your brand. Getting your audience directly invested in your process will help with marketing down the road.

Keep your audience engaged by building anticipation

If you know when you plan on returning, you can use this as a tool to drive engagement. Behind-the-scenes content, countdowns, and calls to action can all help build anticipation for your next big launch, your return or entirely fresh content. This then works to both market your new content and maintain your current audience.

Remember, just because you’re taking a break doesn’t mean you can’t take that time to build and maintain interest from your audience. The relationship between a brand and its audience is like a flower. With regular watering, it’ll flourish. But forget to feed it and it won’t last. Unlike a flower, though, you can take a break from publishing without losing your audience.

Related Reading: Passive Income Ideas

Use Issuu to maintain visibility

At the end of the day, you want to keep eyeballs on your content. Using Issuu’s tools, you not only gain access to all of Issuu’s publisher and marketing tools, but you can maintain a passive income while on hiatus. Planning to take a hiatus? Get started with Issuu’s Creator Hub and learn how our tools can help with your content strategy.