Want to get more people interacting with your posts on social media? Certain types of content can be more effective for getting those clicks, likes and replies – and potentially more effective at converting customers. Below are just some of the best forms of content for boosting engagements.

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Videos

Of all the content you can post, videos are most likely to get engagements. A Tweet containing a video is 10x more likely to get engagements than a Tweet without, while LinkedIn posts containing videos are 20% more likely to be shared than any other type of post. These could be video ads, instructional videos, advice vlog posts or behind-the-scenes videos.

Of course, there are a few rules to making a video stand out on social media. Firstly, it’s very important to have an immediate ‘hook’ to grab people’s attention while scrolling. This needs to be something visually eye-catching as most people will have videos on mute (make sure to add captions). Action shots, facial expressions and questions in the form of text are some of the most effective ways to grab people’s attention.

The quality of your video needs to be high, however it doesn’t have to be movie-quality. You could just rely on a video of you or an employee talking into the camera, but it needs to be shot with a decent camera and ideally using an exterior microphone. If you want to make your video ad more glamorous, then you could consider splashing out on lighting, actors or even using DJI Air 2S drone to film some impressive aerial shots. Hiring a video production company or a professional animator may be a better solution for ensuring that your video is high quality.

Finally don’t make your video too long – most social media videos are between 20 seconds and a minute. 30 seconds tends to be the sweet spot.

Photographs

Photographs are key to platforms like Instagram and Pinterest and can also often get more engagements than text-based posts on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. This could be a photograph of a new product, a photo of your team in action or even a before-and-after photo of a project.

Like videos, photographs need to be high quality. This is particularly important if it’s a product photo. Try to avoid using generic stock photos and use your own photos instead. Make sure to use a professional camera or hire a professional photographer to take these photos.

There are other images you can use besides photographs to grab people’s attention such as illustrations and cool graphics. Once such an example includes…

Infographics

Infographics are a fun way of displaying information such as stats and facts through graphs. They are very popular and effective among B2B companies when you may need to relay facts to your consumers quickly.

There are tools online that can allow you to build your own infographics. Alternatively, you may prefer to hire a graphic designer to create something unique. Make sure that your infographic matches your branding by using the right fonts and colours.

Contests

We all love the idea of being able to win free stuff! This is why contests can be such an effective form of social media content for increasing engagements. Stats show that contests can also lead to followers and extra sales – according to Outgrow, they have a conversion rate of 34%, which is more than any other type of content.

When running a contest, make sure to brush up on the rules of the platform as different have different rules when it comes to contests. Often the best way to rope people in is to outline what consumers can win, show a picture and then provide a hyperlink to an online form that people can complete. There are contest tools and software that you can use to help you randomly select users and track engagements.

Polls/questions

Polls and questions are also great ways to engage users. These could be fun and humorous polls and questions to simply encourage interactions. Alternatively, they could serve as a more serious form or market research.

Some social media sites have their own poll generators and there are various tools you can use for creating multi-option polls. When simply providing a question, you may want to put text into an image in order to make the question stand out more. You could even find ways to blend infographics and polls such as getting users to play spot-the-difference or getting users to select their favourite option for a scale (for instance, a tea company might post a picture of various cups of tea in different strengths with the question ‘how strong do you like your tea?’).

Memes

Memes might seem like the type of content you share personally among your friends for laughs, but they can also be used effectively by businesses for building engagements and breaking up more promotional content.

Ideally the meme needs to be relevant to your brand or industry and there needs to be a level of professionalism to it (balancing professionalism and humour can be a delicate task). There are meme generators that can allow you to use classic meme templates. You may also be able to find other company memes that you can share. This guide at Social Media Examiner offers more tips on using memes in marketing.

Blog posts/article links

Social media is a great platform for sharing blog relevant posts and articles. These could be blog posts that you’ve written on your company site or they could be posts and articles that other people have written that may contain important advice or news. Such posts can be good for building engagements and could also be a way of increasing traffic to your site (in the case of blog posts that you’ve written).

You can find lots of guides on starting a blog online. There are tools that you can use to automatically share links to blog posts on social media as soon as you have published the blog post. You can also use these tools to schedule links to be posted at certain times in order to optimise engagements.

About the Author: Garlak Theodorakis

My name is Garlak Theodorakis, I am graphic designer with almost 10 year experience in the field. Founded Tooft.com in january 2010 with idea to share my knowledge with the world.