Boosting engagement with interactive content

Social media gives brands the opportunity to engage with current and potential customers everyday, and that’s amazing, but what if you want to give your engagement a boost? Alternatively, what if you feel like your engagement has plateaued or plummeted? 

Interactive content can help you boost engagement!

What is interactive content?

Interactive content is content that users can engage with through actions such as voting, answering, clicking, and more. It’s a step beyond what you’d typically think of as engagement on social media, such as a like, comment, or a share.

Why you should use interactive content

Interactive content gives you the opportunity to connect more deeply with your audience to build a better relationship, to gain valuable insights, and can boost overall engagement.

We’ve pulled a few stats to further highlight why you should use interactive content:

• 81% of marketers surveyed agree that interactive content is more effective at grabbing the attention of users than static content is

• A survey of users showed that stories that focused on quizzes or polls were among the top 3 formats users would likely tap through to the end

Now let’s take a look at some of the ways that you can create interactive content on social media.

How to use interactive content

Let’s look at Instagram for example!

Instagram Stories in particular offers several ways to interact with content. For example, you can insert polls, quizzes, and question boxes. 

Did you know that you can also add polls to the caption area of your posts and that you can add quizzes to your reels?!

We’ve included some examples of these types of posts below:

First up, we have a series of polls (this or that style). It can be focused on a relevant day/observance like in our example, based on your products (i.e. if you’re a beauty brand use a this or that for a product category like lip gloss vs. lipstick), and more.

Next, we have a few examples of using the question box feature. Use these to ask questions related to your services and products, like what people want to see from your brand. You can also do an “ask me anything” where your audience can ask questions about your brand, products, or services. If for example, you’re a fashion brand, you can ask users what trends they’re going to be jumping on for next season.

Here is an example of a quiz and, while we created this one for fun, you can also do quizzes that are more educational, for example, ones that test user product knowledge. Take a look below:

Did you notice that we snuck in a question box stories post in that last example? Using a mix of interactive features can help keep things fresh, fun, and engaging.

These are just a few examples of interactive tools and ways to boost engagement, but the opportunities are endless! We focused on Instagram above, but you can also create interactive content on other platforms as well. For example…

• Create polls on LinkedIn and YouTube

• Host a live on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube

Remember, one of the best ways to boost engagement is to be consistent and give a bit back! Basically, make sure you’re posting regularly and be social, reply to comments, like and share posts from other creators, your followers, and other brands. And if you want to boost engagement even more, try using interactive content! 

Have fun with it!