Among the best Content Marketing strategies, interaction on social media is one of the best when it comes to bringing results in the short and medium terms.
With the right interactive content, you will be able to retain and delight users with thought-provoking and highly engaging content.
Some of the most popular formats are quizzes and polls, but many other options of interactive posts for social media are valuable.
You just need to understand which ones work according to the audience and buyer persona definitions, adapting everything you need to make posts even more attractive and personalized.
In this article, we will address the concept of interaction on social media and its application in the following topics:
What are Interactive Posts for Social Media?
Interactive posts for social media are posts that require social media users to actively interact with the content, creating an experience that opens a powerful two-way engagement channel between people and companies.
They’re posts that go beyond the typical fare you scroll past daily on Facebook or Twitter.
Adding interactive posts for social media to your digital marketing strategy gives your company a way to reach consumers and help them remember your brand.
In return, consumers get fun, personalized experiences they’ll love.
This is quite priceless today, as social media is more than just a fun way for a small handful of people to stay in touch with friends or pass some extra time now and then.
Approximately 59 percent of the world’s people are on social media, making it a massive opportunity for marketers to reach an audience.
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What exactly is Social Media Interaction?
Interactive content on social media invites the reader to participate with opinions, ideas, comments, or any other contribution that comes from the other side of the screen.
An important aspect of this format is personalization, since, unlike static content, the user’s response dictates the direction that a specific post will take individually.
In other words: people will have a different experience based on their response or submitted interaction.
The format is recommended to improve brand reach in the online environment. This allows differentiation for companies that work closely with the corporate universe and prioritize unattractive content with the sole purpose of self-promotion or sales.
What are the Benefits of Social Media Interaction?
Disputing user attention on social media has become a complicated task. The platforms accumulate over 3.5 billion users worldwide, who connect with the most diverse profiles.
Brands, friends, family, and several other pages end up competing and endeavoring to guarantee one more minute of the user’s attention, which, in turn, engages with those contents that arouse a sense of identification and interest, due to personalization.
Therefore, amid the decline in the engagement of social networks such as Facebook and Instagram — with their mysterious algorithms —, it became necessary to invest more and more in a format capable of holding attention, which would result in positive metrics for the success of a page.
In addition to creativity and the good use of strategies on social media, interactive content has become a highly consumable format precisely because it speaks with the user in a personalized way.
Its main benefits are:
- Gathering of personalized data about the audience.
- Higher engagement rate.
- Increase in the reach of posts.
- Increase in the dwell time of each post.
- A real possibility of the content becoming a viral post, that is, when users tag a large volume of profiles of friends, family, or acquaintances.
In general, all the benefits of using the strategy come from the increasing need to deliver value through content, whether they are advertisements or not.
The user has become “immune” to various types of advertising, but social networks still have a great power to enter the lives of your followers and gain valuable space in their daily lives.
This only happens, however, if the posts are thoroughly considered according to the public’s data.
There is no point in following shallow trends based on the chances of succeeding — when creating proposals that make sense with the brand scenario, make sure that a strategy will be executed as well as can be expected.
Interactive Posts for Social Media: 5 Ideas to Boost Engagement
After learning what social media interaction is and its main benefits, it is important to understand the best practical applications for the strategy.
1. Quizzes
Instagram already has a quiz feature. With it, it’s possible to ask questions or make a statement with up to four possible answers.
When editing the content, you choose the right answer and await your followers’ feedback.
As they interact, it is possible to analyze the responses, see which one was clicked the most, and extract the best data from the results in real-time.
2. Polls
Also, on Instagram, polls are a great way to engage with followers.
A good direction of use is to collect information about users’ satisfaction, preferences, or knowledge, as it is a more restricted option than quizzes, for example.
If most of your followers answer that they already know about a certain subject, it is not worth investing in more basic content about it.
Here are other interesting ways to use the feature:
- Preferences on specific topics
- The best time of day to launch or publish content
- General opinions about products or services
In fact, polls are widely available, as they can also be created on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, just to name a few examples.
3. Questions
Once again, on Instagram, invest in the question box.
It follows the same strategy style as the two previously mentioned formats, but with the possibility for the follower to deliver more specific answers.
Therefore, follow a more complete line as well, taking the opportunity to explore subjects more deeply.
4. Viral content
This type of content is easily applied to any social network, strategy, or brand profile.
Invest in more playful content and explore everyday situations that can spark the user’s interest in sharing it with people in their daily circle.
5. Games
Another way to apply interaction on social media is with games.
We use as an example a word search game, which instigates the follower to share his answers in the comments tab.
It is also possible to combine games with platform resources, such as stories, encouraging the follower to pause the screen at a specific time.
It is interesting to note that, in addition to holding users’ attention, you also gain an increase in screen time.
BONUS: Using social media to promote different interactive content formats
In addition to leveraging different types of interactive posts for social media within the platforms themselves, active social channels make wonderful ways to offer access to additional experiences.
Interactive content comes in many new, different, and exciting forms.
Informative materials like interactive ebooks, infographics, whitepapers, or videos are popular options, as are helpful tools like interactive calculators and maps.
Use your social channels to promote options like these to your audience.
Provide direct links to the content and invite interested parties to check it out. You can also offer additional incentives to sweeten the deal even further if you like.
How to Create Interactive Posts on Social Media
To win public engagement with the best of what social media interaction offers, we recommend following some important practices. Several of them could already be noticed throughout this post, but it is worth reinforcing them.
1. Know your audience
By structuring well-defined buyer persona and target audience strategies, you will be able to understand which types of interactive content work and which can be discarded.
In the case of profiles whose audience is older, the simpler the interaction, the better.
In those cases where young people are the majority, there are great possibilities to explore interaction by mixing it with memes and current trends without thinking so much about the limits of understanding resources and calls.
2. Plan your strategy
Interactive posts for social media are similar to any other type of content in that they have to be perfectly on point to generate the results you’re looking for.
Plan your strategy carefully, considering what you already know about your target audience.
What topics, events, and concepts do your social media followers care most about? What formats have worked best for your brand in the past?
Try revisiting ideas that your engaged audience has loved before and adding a fresh interactive take. Consider tapping into current events and hot social trends for additional impact.
3. Segment content for each social media
Instagram and Facebook are different from LinkedIn, which, in turn, is also very different from Twitter and YouTube.
Each social network has its particularity and a user profile, so it is worth researching what works best on them in a specific way.
For example, from the strategies we mentioned in the post, Twitter goes better with games and viral content, while Instagram allows for the creation of quizzes and polls.
On LinkedIn, it is worth betting on more formal content and using interactivity in thought-provoking calls to share views and knowledge in comments, or even tag friends.
4. Assemble a terrific creative team
Although anyone can brainstorm a couple of great interactive posts for social media here and there, that won’t be enough if you’re serious about really getting results.
Truly next-level interactive posts are part of a bigger plan, especially if you’re planning to publish a series of them over a longer period.
That’s where it pays to have the right creative team in your corner. Professional designers, artists, video creators, and content writers can give your content the X-factor it needs to make your audience sit up and take notice.
If you already have a pool of talented creatives to choose from, decide which folks are the best fit for your next interactive social media campaign.
And if you don’t, consider putting out some feelers for freelance talent that can help.
5. Know how to turn data into efficient campaigns
A valuable aspect of interactive content on social media is the amount of data about the users that can be collected.
However, all that is useless if there are no well-defined strategies to analyze them and subsequently turn them into new posts.
If you understand that your audience has advanced knowledge about certain topics, there are no great reasons to prioritize shallower content.
The same goes for opinions about products and services. More than collecting, know how to interpret the data, and share it with other company teams.
6. Carefully analyze your results
Taking a closer look at the numbers and analyzing what they tell you once your posts have made the rounds is crucial to understanding how successful they were (or weren’t).
How well did each post help propel you toward your end goal? Did they boost sales, gain you followers, or get more engagement?
Once you fully analyze your data and determine which posts performed best (and why), use what you know to make your next round of interactive social media content even more powerful.
7. Make sure you use the right tools
In addition to hiring the right creative talent to help and using what you know about your audience as a guide, applying the right tools to your campaign can be a huge game-changer.
Ion is just one incredible example that’s perfectly suited to interactive content production.
Ion’s responsive templates make creating fully responsive interactive content experiences from scratch a snap, even if you’re a complete first-timer.
Ion’s interface also takes the guesswork out of collecting and analyzing your data. It’s trusted by multiple household names, as well, including DHL, Sears, BASF, and General Electric.
Wrap Up
Social networks are a great channel capable of gathering highly strategic information that must reach all employees.
They, in turn, must turn them into points of investment and improvement. Know how to synchronize the information with the company’s other internal data so that the actions on social media work.
In addition to the interactive actions on platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, there is an incredible range of possibilities to apply what we learned in this post in Content Marketing.
Formats such as ebooks, landing pages, interactive videos, websites, and email are needed to complement the strategy in search of engaged, interested users ready to be impacted by valuable content.
If you are interested in the universe of interaction in addition to social media, get to know the Ion Interactive tool and learn all about creating even more interesting experiences for your audience!
Start creating interactive content with Ion and increase your marketing results!
Start creating interactive content with Ion and increase your marketing results!
