Social media is a platform made for interaction. A place where individuals and brands do their best to express a message across the masses. By creating an engaging environment, brands can use their social media posts to capture the attention of their audience.
With the amount of users on social media, your message can get diluted in between all of the timelines and noise. To make sure your social posts stand out, you need to be creating interactive content that creates a conversation.
Coming up with different types of social media posts and ideas can be hard. But, coming up with engaging social media content can be even more difficult. That’s why I curated a list of 4 different types of social media posts that will help you increase your brand’s engagement and will help you stand out in front of your followers.
1. Interactive Social Media Posts
People often forget, but social media is two-way form of communication. We have the ability to interact with our followers in several different ways. What’s even more impressive is that within this interaction with our followers, we can gain valuable insight that can help us learn and improve our content in the future.
Polls
Polls have been incorporated in major social platforms such as Instagram stories, Twitter, and Facebook. Whether you’re looking to get an opinion from your followers or to get an answer from your audience. The ability to add a poll within your content is a great way to capture user attention. The cost to participate is simply a click and it is a great conversation starter.
Quizzes
If you’ve ever browsed the BuzzFeed website, you’ve probably seen the ridiculous, yet addicting quizzes that usually end up telling you what type of food item you are based on your answers. A quiz is a perfect way to get users to click-through and spend some time on your website. They key to creating an engaging quiz on social media is to keep it fun and informal. Don’t make it a survey. Create interesting questions with close-ended answers so that it takes the user less time to finish. If you do this right, you should receive more engagement and shares on your post.
2. Visual Social Media Posts
Big surprise right? Not really…
Visual content is at the forefront of the internet right now and strong visual content will do much more than just providing engagement for your social media posts. Visuals will strengthen your brand image and it will bring more eyes to your blog content. Here are 3 forms of visual social media posts that will drive more engagement to your page.
Video
Video is one of the most engaging forms of online content today. Video has been trending upwards and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon. Video incorporates moving visuals and sound – a perfect formula to capture someone’s attention. A text post is valuable, but a video can capture your attention, while giving you memorable visuals.
Customized Graphics and Professional Photos
Ready for another cliche saying? A picture can say a thousand words.
Relevant professional photos and customized graphics are huge engagement magnets. While a video is great, they take longer to produce and require a larger budget. However, professional photos can be obtained for with no-cost from free stock photo websites. You can then used these photos and turn them into customized social media posts with an online tool Snappa.
Infographics
Both informative and visually appealing, infographics are a great way to encourage engagement through shares. If you create a strong infographic, you are displaying your expertise in your industry and providing valuable information to your readers. All the right things to trigger a share from your brand. As individuals, we like easy-to-consume content especially easy-to-consume informative content. So infographics are a great way to fulfill these needs without boring the audience. Here are 7 infographic examples to help get you started!
3. Incentive Social Media Content
Who doesn’t like free stuff? Incentives are a great way to drive engagement when done right. By offering an incentive in exchange for more engagement, you may not see sales right away, but it is a long-term play. A long-term play where you can get more followers and viewers, which you can sell to later. It also gives the participants a chance to become a true fan of your brand. Some people have great content, but they struggle to distribute. Incentives are a great way to fix this issue and get your content across more eyes.
Giveaways and Contests
Although, contests and giveaways may differ from one another, I would categorize them under the same category for driving engagement. The gist of a contest or giveaway is to provide an incentive in exchange for some type of engagement.
An example of this could be to offer a product of some sort to giveaway and the only way to enter is to engage with the piece of content. This could be in the form of shares, likes, tagging friends, follows, and much more.
You can create a contest to giveaway an item. In order to enter the contest, users could be asked to generate user content by taking a picture, posting it, and tagging your social accounts. In order to get the most engagement, you want to simplify the way that individuals can enter. User-generated content might sound like the most effective way, but you might get less people entering. Find a good compromise and don’t ask for too much from prospective participants.
4. Relatable Social Media Posts
Some things that cause users to engage with a post include: valuable content, relevant informative posts, and content that resonates with the user. Relatable content is a major key to creating engaging content. You want to be able to customize your content to your audience so that they can apply it to their life/work and apply the value of your content accordingly.
Memes
You may think that memes are an online joke and most times they are. But memes can provide quite a bit of engagement especially when done right. If you can provide a relevant meme to your followers, you should see positive results. You can do this by taking common informal issues from your industry and turning them into a fun meme. Large companies have done this and they’ve seen great results. It adds a human aspect to your content and sometimes having a full professional look on your posts can make it seem automated and robotic for your users.
Quotes
If memes aren’t the right fit for you or your brand. Quotes are another way to resonate with your audience and they are usually much more formal. Nothing better than reading a motivational quote to help get your week started. Although they might be generic, this helps more people relate to it. This can help increase your engagement. Doesn’t hurt to add a “tag someone who could use this quote” to help create a sharing environment on your posts.
Here is a list of 105 powerful marketing quotes that we’ve compiled and you can create your own visuals with our image quote maker!
Final Thoughts
Engagement is created when you give your viewers a valuable opportunity to interact with your social content. You shouldn’t expect to post anything and everything and have followers engage with your content. They’re human, they will engage when it makes sense for them to engage.
The resources and options are out there to make content that attracts attention. Find the best content for your brand and audience. From there, form a content strategy around that. The types of social media posts on your pages should be relevant, valuable, and have interactive features. If they contain these characteristics, you will notice a positive change on your engagement!
Have any other types of social media posts to add? I’d love to hear them down in the comments below! Let me know what pieces of content bring you the most social engagement!
