Tips for creating engaging social content

Sahail Ashraf posted on 23 November 2021

It’s not always easy to create high quality, engaging social media content for your marketing. In this post we look at a few ways to make it happen.

If you’re creating post after post and your engagement rate isn’t steadily rising, then you have a problem. There are ways to build engagement however, and in this post we are going to take a close look at what you need to do.

Contests

This is one of the very best ways to build engagement among your audience members. Essentially, you are rewarding people for engagement. That tends to work very well.

You could ask them to share your post, and every time they do they get a reward. Or you could set up a website where they send in user generated content and you decide which is the best. Again, that involves actual engagement with your post and the brand itself.

There are some areas here that you will need to be careful about. For a start, each social media platform will have some rules around contests and how they are supposed to be run.

The most obvious one is around sponsorship and endorsement. Facebook, for example, will make it clear that you must specify that it is not involved in your promotion. While this is not hard to notify your audience about, if you forget to do this there could be some serious consequences.

Leverage Influencer power

We all know that Influencers are important to any marketing campaign, and that you don’t even have to spend thousands trying to find one. However, even when we use Influencers, we don’t always leverage their full potential. 

One thing you can do is to tag an Influencer when you quote them in a post. This works on a couple of levels, the most obvious one being that the followers of the Influencer will see your tags and you will gain more engagement from that.

Also, be sure to make the post where you tag and mention the Influencer a particularly attractive one, with solid imagery. That gives it the best chance of being seen and engaged with.

Testimonials and reviews

It is no secret that people buy more readily when they see social proof. Having reviews from happy customers on your website will be second-nature for you by now, but using them effectively in social situations is not always a simple concept to jump onto.

Including testimonials in your social media posts is a great way to get more people to engage with the work. Making your post attractive and eye-catching means that more people will see it online. Then giving the audience social proof of your quality via reviews and testimonials just builds up that engagement.

Avoid text dumps

You must make sure you use as little text as possible to get your message across.

If you do need to use a little more text than an average post would contain, sprinkle it with some images. It’s important to remember that social media also relies upon having some white space. Your audience will quickly become tired if they just see a lot of text. 

Try to always include images, and whatever you do, don’t flood the screen with text that simply will not be read.

Level up your content to visuals

This is a really useful way of making your content more engaging. When creating a post, you can publish and then wait for the engagement to come in. After it has, you can spice things up a little and convert that post into something else.

This is still something that isn’t quite on the radar for some brands but it works well. Take an old social media post that has received engagement in the past and convert it into an infographic or video. You could be really creative with this. You know the ideas and concepts receive engagement, so just repackage the stuff into visually engaging content.

Hashtags

The world of social media can never get enough of hashtags. They are a useful tool for anyone who wants to follow a certain topic or brand, and they make perfect sense when you are creating content.

Hashtags on some platforms (like Instagram for example) make the post show up on the hashtags’ page, so they are very useful.

Highlight your partners, customers, and employees. 

If you’re doing something people love, consider launching advocacy programs featuring customers, partners, and employees to connect your community, amplify your voice, and engage newcomers by giving them a voice. It works well and produces instant engagement with the human factor involved.

If you’re involved in social media marketing you need to get your hands on Locowise. It’s a platform that offers metrics and data on all the major channels, so you can keep track of it all. Request a demo and give Locowise a test run.