A good way to drive engagement and shake up your usual posting process is by utilizing interactive content. Interactive content gets your audience more involved, increasing click-throughs and provides more opportunities to educate and delight your network.
Interactive content includes any content a user can click on, click-through, answer, or play with. These content pieces take more effort (and sometimes money) to create, but users generally spend more time, and get more value from. They’ll get your audience to engage, and can even be used it to get to know your audience better.
To help get you thinking, here are seven types of interactive content to consider.
1. Quizzes/Polls
Quizzes and polls are an inexpensive way to create interactive content. Think about it – how many times have you stopped to find out what kind of pizza you are?
Quizzes can be fun, or help your audience determine where they stand, which can become an opportunity for you to offer your product or service. They can help you dive into the mind of your audience and create double the content (once when you post, and another when you post the results).
Another benefit of polls and quizzes is that it can show your audience that the conversation goes both ways, and that you care about their opinions. Another fun way to interact with fans is to ask them to caption photos.
Twitter, Facebook Pages, Facebook groups and Instagram Stories each have built-in polls for you to use. Each enables you to add several answer options (Facebook polls even let you add photos and .GIFs as options), and you have control over how long the poll is up for.
Once someone votes, they’ll be able to see poll results. On Instagram Stories you can use the Poll Sticker to create a two option poll that will be live for 24 hours.
If the network you’d like to run a poll on doesn’t have a built-in tool, you can always write out your options in your caption and have your audience comment the corresponding letter to their answer. You can also run polls on landing pages on your website.
2. Contest/Sweepstakes
Classic, old-fashioned contests and sweepstakes are also great examples of interactive content, and can be a solid way to generate more engagement.
Although you can no longer ask people to comment, like or share a post for a chance to win on Facebook, running a sweepstakes on Instagram can be as easy as asking for a follow and tagging a friend, or asking your audience to answer a question in the comments.
Make sure your prize is brand related, and remember that simple is okay.
3. Multiple Choice Posts
Multiple choice posts can be fun, especially on platforms that allow multiple image posts.
Each image can be a different option for your audience to choose from – you can use this method to let them help you choose your next flavor or product you may be looking to offer. You’ll engage them, get their opinion and make more sales, since you’ll essentially be providing them with what they chose.
4. Interactive Infographics, Whitepapers and eBooks
These may be a little more costly to create, but can be really fun pieces for your audience to interact with.
Interactive infographics and other content pieces can include hover pop-ups or click-throughs to other landing pages, quizzes, extra content and more, and can be a great tool for educating your audience on your particular industry or product.
You can pack a lot of information into an infographic or eBook that include calls to action or fun pop up facts. To promote these on your social channels you can pull snippets from the infographic, or create new snackable content from the data in the infographic, and use a call to action to drive traffic to the full post.
5. Workbooks and Assessments
Spinning off of the previous bullet, workbooks are a great way to offer value to your audience.
You can add interactive elements within your workbook, and include an assessment process, or create a standalone assessment based on your product or service. Using the final outcome of the assessment, you’ll then be able to offer the person a solution (your product or service).
6. Calculators
Show your audience how much money they can save by using your product with a calculator.
Any information that can be quantified can be used for a calculator, and can help your audience use numbers to relate to a bigger message (aka a reason for them to use your product or visit your website).
7. Interactive Videos
Interactive videos are another great way to integrate interactive content, utilizing the medium that’s showing the most reach and engagement of any content type.
Interactive videos can include click-throughs to landing pages, quizzes, or play certain sections based on the viewer’s choices. There are some great tools out there to help you create these types of videos, but YouTube allows for simple video interaction cards that can lead your viewer to subscribe to your channel or watch a related video or playlist.
These are just some of the ways in which you can use interactive content to boost engagement – and as we all know, engagement is becoming increasingly important to securing social media reach. Hopefully these tips get you thinking about how you can incorporate similar into your process.
A version of this post was first published on Dhariana Lozano’s blog.