You’ve gathered followers, you post content consistently – but something still seems to be missing… engagement! Sometimes ramping up social media interaction can be difficult, but fear not, as I bring you 7 post ideas that drive social media engagement for your brand or business! Let’s get started.
1. Fill in the blank:
Fill in the blanks draw engagement because they set up the reader with most of the answer. All they have to do is pop in their own thought at the end.
Examples:
Fill in the blank: My biggest social media marketing headache is ______
If I had an unlimited social media budget I would spend it on ______
Now you take take the answers to inspire future content ideas and more!
2. Caption This
Ask your followers get a little creative and caption images, videos or .GIFs. Simply post your content with the caption “Caption This” and see what responses you get.
3. Ask For Opinions
Simply ask your followers for their opinions on a (brand related) trending topic, an article you’re sharing, news within your industry etc.
4. Polls
Polls are a fun way to gather opinions on a subject and get your audience to interact with you! They can be a great content mix up/engagement generator. Ask a question that is related to both your company and your follower’s interests. For example a restaurant or food brand can ask “What is your favorite meal of the day?” with choices for breakfast, lunch, and dinner – it’s an easy question anyone can answer. That was a very basic example, but your polls can get pretty detailed and offer you insight into your audience’s behaviors and preferences – which you can in turn use to develop better content or even products.
You can even leverage real time (brand related) conversations and events to create your polls about. Here are different kinds of polls you can run:
Twitter Polls
Twitter natively support polls, which makes gathering answers so much easier. Tie the poll to Twitter’s real time conversational nature and you’ve got social media engagement. Create polls related to popular conversations, events, or other moments – and remember to use the hashtag within your question for added visibility! Here is a poll I conducted over the summer on my Twitter account.
Which #socialmedia network is your favorite/offers the most return for #business or #brand?#SMM #Marketing
— Dhariana Lozano NYC Social Media Consultant (@DhariLo) July 5, 2016
To drive more traffic to your polls link to it from your other social media channels, website, or blog.
A vs. B
Keep it simple and let your audience choose between two options. Below is an example of a post I created a few years ago for salt water taffy company, The Salty Road. When the owner couldn’t choose which wrapper she liked best we suggested to leave it to the fans! This post did great and the brand went ahead with the most popular wrapper design.
Use Reactions to Attract Votes On Facebook Fan Pages
I’ve been seeing this pop up more often and I think it’s great! Now that Facebook has Reactions, you might as well have a little fun with them. You can do this by overlaying the Reactions faces over a grid of choices and ask your followers to vote using reactions. Below is an example of what this can look like from Sofia Vergara’s Facebook fan page. Although this was actually a live video poll (which is why you see the counters under the reaction faces) you can get an idea of how to set up this kind of post and image.
P.S. Native polls are available within Facebook Groups, so if you run a group take advantage of this built in feature to drive social media engagement and interaction.
5. Questions
Asking questions is probably one of the easiest ways to get your audience interacting with you on social media – and yet another great way to “pick their brains”. Here are a few different types of questions you can ask. Post these as text, or add an image/video for more visibility.
Open Ended Questions are great for driving social media engagement because they open the floor for thought sharing and conversation. Ex: Team A battles Team B on Wednesday! Where will you be watching the game?
Yes or No Questions are simple to answer and can be a good starting point to work your audience up to answering more open ended questions or discussions.
General or Brand Related Questions can humanize your brand, and help you connect with your audience by gaining more knowledge about their needs. I will advise you keep these brand related, for example, a good general question for my Facebook fan page could be “How many hours a day do you spend on social media marketing?”. If you want to be completely conversational you can keep it as easy as “How was your day?” which might be a nice content break for your audience.
As I mentioned earlier in this post one of the best parts about polls or questions is that you can then use the answers from your question to create or share content our audience will love. For example, if you are a food based business you may ask “What is the best thing you ever ate?”. Now let’s say pizza is the top answer- you can take this opportunity to share your own recipe! Follow the question with a post saying something to the effect of: “Thanks for answering our question on Friday, since you guys love pizza so much, here’s a recipe for a quick and easy pizza dinner”. Use the information you get to get to the bottom of what makes your fans tick, and give it to them! (and say hello to a bump in social media engagement)
6. Location Based Posts
Brick and mortar businesses or brands that concentrate on a specific location can try posting about local happenings, or your target area in general. Bringing attention to landmarks or current events in your vicinity can bring visibility to your brand. You can leverage user generated content or create your own videos or images for these kinds of posts. Remember to tie the image or video back to a question to boost social media engagement and interaction.
My example of a post here would be from my current client REMY. REMY is a New York City based apartment app which focuses on matching New Yorkers with crowdsourced, no fee apartments. We like to feature different neighborhoods and activities focused on life here in the big apple to attract followers who live in NYC. In the post below we integrate a general question, with location based image and caption – and we got a few responses.
Another advantage to featuring local content? On networks like Instagram and Twitter you can tag locations – bringing a little more visibility to each post.
7. Host Live Video or Twitter Chat
Live videos can rack up a lot of reach and social media engagement. Try them on Facebook , Twitter, Instagram or even Snapchat (you can learn how to use live videos for your brand or business here). Collaborate with influencers to host a Q & A, demo a product or just chat (and ask them to invite their audience). The same goes for Twitter chats. Let the audience submit questions in advance and take a few live ones as well!
This kind of post can turn into a mini campaign and can provide content you can repurpose for later! To learn how read: 3 Ways to Use Live Videos After They’ve Gone Live.
BONUS: My bonus tip for driving social media engagement and interaction is to use calls to action when you want your audience to do something. Yes, it can be that simple. Use calls to action such as “share this post”, “leave a comment”, or “click this link” to get your visitors to do what you want. Just remember to keep these to a minimum as you don’t want your audience to get tired of you telling them what to do.
I hope this post can help you get creative and create posts that drive social media engagement for your brand or business. Remember that you may not get a response the first time, or the second, or the third – but keep trying! To get things going and encourage others get your employees, friends and family to help you with comments and votes.