7 Cool Content Ideas to Boost Your Social Media Engagement
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Running out of ideas for interesting social media posts? There’s no question social media is an important marketing tool for businesses, but it’s not always easy to come up with something fresh and different to keep your social media audience interested. Give your social media posts a makeover for 2018 with these 7 content categories that are proven to increase shares and conversions.
1. Quizzes
People love quizzes—they love to take them and they love to share them. According to research by BuzzSumo, the average quiz is shared 1,900 times on social media.
Several applications, including Buzzfeed, Fyrebox, and Qzzr, let you create free custom quizzes that you can share in your social channels.
Not only can a quiz be a simple, fun way to get customers to engage with you on social media, you can also use quizzes to learn more about them, gauge their interest in your products and services, and even add detail and depth to your customer personas.
You can use a personality-type quiz related to your brand, so rather than the usual “Which Game of Thrones Character Are You” quiz, you might create a “What Type of Pet Owner Are You” quiz for a pet-related company, “What’s Your Ideal Paint Color” for an interior design firm, or ‘What’s Your Perfect-Size Home” for a realty or property development company.
Alternatively, a knowledge-type quiz can focus more on educating customers about your business or challenging them on how much they know about your brand or industry. The results can help you assess your market position and branding and give you valuable insights about where you need to invest more effort in marketing, advertising, and education.
To use quizzes to generate leads, require that quiz-takers provide some basic information, such as rveys
Want input from your target audience? Social media surveys offer your customers an entertaining way to give you valuable information and insight. You can use a survey or poll to gather feedback and opinions about your brand, conduct market research for a new product, identify pain points and expectations, assess customer satisfaction, or identify whether a particular promotion or piece of content worked or didn’t.
SurveyMonkey lets you create free surveys for almost any purpose, and either embed them in Facebook or share them on other social media channels. Applications including Polldaddy, SurveyNuts and SurveyPlanet also let you create and post polls and surveys on your social media pages for free.
If your goal is to create engagement and a sense of community, try Instagram’s new interactive poll stickers, which you can add to any photo or video along with a caption and custom poll choices. Once you publish your poll to your story, followers simply click on an option to vote.
3. Infographics
While an infographic on a blog might be used to distill a large amount of information into an easily digestible format, on social media, infographics tend to be simpler, providing a single fact or statistic in an eye-catching graphic.
Infographics are especially popular on photo-based social media channels like Pinterest and Instagram, so don’t forget to upload them to those channels as well as your other social media pages.
Free, do-it-yourself infographic creation tools include Canva, Easel.ly, and Piktochart. If you’ve created a larger infographic for a blog post, crop a single section of it for social media and link it back to the full infographic on your site.
Take your infographic a step further by making it interactive—pose a question and have an answer pop up, or animate a portion of the graphic, such as a graph or chart.
4. Memes
Technically, a meme is a cultural symbol or social idea that is spread virally from person to person. In plain language, a meme is usually a photo with a funny caption, though it can also be a short video or GIF, and it can also be thoughtful, absurd, inspiring, or shocking rather than humorous.
Memes are undeniably popular, but whether you should use memes for business marketing depends on whether they fit your brand and voice, and whether you’re confident you can use them without annoying or offending your audience or violating licensing or trademark rights.
If you do use memes, make sure they project your image and will appeal to your target audience. To be truly original, create your own meme with a tool like Make a Meme rather than appropriating an existing meme.
5. Animated GIFs
A GIF is a short looping video clip or animation, often with a text overlay. Not only are GIFs fun and engaging for social media users, they can be very effective at telling a story in a short amount of time.
Online GIF libraries such as Giphy and Gif Bin let you search thousands of GIFs, of you can create your own with apps such as Giphy and imgflip.
If you’re creating your own, consider a video of how a product works, a quick tutorial, team members doing something fun, or even a time lapse video of a typical day at your office.
6. Incentives & Promotions
Who doesn’t love something free? Get your social media followers interested with a coupon, free trial, or freebie. Not only will it bring in sales, it will give potential customers a chance to get familiar with your brand.
For maximum reach and effectiveness, consider tying a promotion to a current event or season, and create promotions that will appeal to your specific target audience.
7. User-Generated Content
You don’t have to be the only one sharing on your social media accounts. Turn your social media interaction into a real conversation by asking your audience to share their own content relevant to your posts.
Does your company have a dog-friendly policy? Ask people to post their own photos of office animals. Have a usage tip for one of your products? Ask customers to share their own best ideas. Getting your audience involved is a great way to bring personality to your page and make real connections with your customers.