Remember those letters that started with, “Dear Valued Customer”?
Companies have historically addressed their customers as an anonymous mass. With the development of new digital technologies, marketing has become increasingly personalized.
Customers want to connect with brands personally and expect tailored experiences. One of the ways brands can engage with customers on a more personal level is by using interactive posts on social media.
In this post, we will explore:
- What interactive posts are and why they work
- The many benefits of interactivity on social media
- Types of social posts that encourage interactions
- Tips for creating interactive posts that will boost social engagement
- Next steps
What Are Interactive Posts?
“Interactive post” is a social media term for posts that engage their audience and facilitate a two-way conversation between the poster and reader (or customer).
Customer interaction on a social media post includes leaving a comment, mentioning another account in the comments section, or resharing the post. It could also involve tapping on a link, participating in a poll, and more.
This interactivity is a form of gamification, as it incentivizes the customer. They could receive better support and social recognition or rewards such as product vouchers and discount codes.
63% of customers expect businesses to offer customer service through social media, according to G2.
Interactive posts aim to encourage more customer participation on social media to increase reach and followers. If you are reaching your target audience and they are following your account, it will help you gain more sales leads and paying customers.
The Benefits Of Using Interactive Posts
One of the primary purposes of social media is communication and networking. People use social media to keep in touch with loved ones, read exciting stories, and find products to buy.
Adding more interactivity to your posts will increase the chances of people noticing and responding to them.
You Can Use Interactive Posts To:
- Activate Passive Account Followers
- Improve Post Engagement Rate
- Drive Traffic To Your Website Or App
- Understand Your Audience Better
- Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)
- Increase Brand Awareness Through Social Sharing
- Create A Strong Brand Affiliation With Customers
- Get Customer Feedback
- Garner Zero-Party Data
- Improve The Performance Of Ad Campaigns
There are more benefits to using interactive posts, but we have listed a few of the main ones.
Activate Passive Account Followers
When working with the algorithms on social platforms, it is essential to have a following that is actively engaged with your content.
Social platform algorithms will always prefer accounts with active followers as opposed to a higher number of disengaged followers.
Active followers are also more likely to follow through with marketing and sales actions, such as subscribing to a newsletter and purchasing a product or service.
In this sense, interactivity on your social accounts can directly impact your business’s bottom line.
Improve Post Engagement Rate
Businesses and individuals use interactive posts because they want to improve post engagement. In the same way that an active following boosts your presence, high engagement on any given post will increase that post’s reach.
When people take valuable actions on your social posts (like, comment, tap on a link, or share), social media algorithms push these closer to the top of feeds.
This is because a higher post engagement rate shows that a post is particularly relevant to its audience. A high post engagement rate could also indicate the formation of a trend, which can make it go viral (producing a high volume of publicity for the account that posted it).
For example, Twitter’s Trending section shows a personalized daily list of popular topics and hashtags. This list is, by default, curated according to which accounts you follow, your interests, and your location.
Twitter looks at how many people comment, retweet, and like posts about a certain topic. A trend usually has a representative post that provides the basis or context of the emerging topic.
Drive Traffic To Your Website Or App
If the content in your post is centered around the potential customer learning more about or trying your product or service, interactivity will increase the likelihood that they will take that action.
The key is to use the content to attract the customer’s attention and highlight how tapping on the link to your website or app will benefit them.
Admirable copywriters like Joanna Wiebe from Copyhackers use customers’ words to write compelling copy and calls to action (CTAs). This is called the Voice of Customer (VoC) and has been used since the 1990s to do market research and improve product development.
Understand Your Audience Better
Interactive posts lead to conversations with your audience. Of course, customers understand that they are not talking to an entity but a representative of your company; either a social media manager or a customer support person.
There is hardly anything more valuable for a successful marketing strategy than talking to customers.
Some companies also use reply bots to handle these conversations at scale, but humanizing customer conversations as often as possible is recommended.
Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)
Since 1999, the term “Web 2.0” has been used to describe the shift from read-only content on the internet to users actively participating in content creation.
UGC has led to increased collaboration and dialogue between internet users, with social media networks playing a major role.
Interactive posts can be written in such a way as to prompt readers to create their own content about the product or service, including images, videos, and text.
When social media users create content, their followers see it and can interact with their comments and posts. This can greatly benefit your company by leveraging social networking within your follower niche.
Hashtags are especially useful for linking UGC with your marketing campaigns or topics in your area of expertise. Social media users can also follow hashtags to receive regular updates from your company and other content creators.
Increase Brand Awareness Through Social Sharing
Engaging, interactive content that is tastefully branded with your company logo and colors (and perhaps even your slogan) can increase brand awareness.
People are more likely to remember your brand name if they deal with it concretely, such as through a branded game or hashtag challenge.
Social media marketing is an extended version of word-of-mouth marketing; people tend to trust recommendations from family, friends, colleagues, or celebrities they admire.
In this way, social channels make brands more accessible through engaging and easily shareable posts.
Create A Strong Brand Affiliation With Customers
The difference between passively reading a social post and actively interacting with a brand is that interaction requires buy-in.
Interactive posts necessitate that the user invests their time and effort. Once you have convinced potential customers to invest their time and effort, you have overcome a major hurdle to selling your product or service.
Ensuring the interaction is positive and exciting will create a memorable experience that the customer will link with your brand. Brand affiliation often means that the customer will be willing to share their positive experience with others and invite them to join the experience.
Get Customer Feedback
Adding an interactive experience to your social media content can take the form of a simple question. We see many brands doing this on their accounts, especially on Twitter.
A question-based type of post encourages audience engagement, boosting the rank of your post. It also enables you to learn more about your target audience and how to improve your products and services.
Garner Zero-Party Data
Related to the previous benefit, zero-party data is customer information passed on to your company directly (and willingly) by your customers.
With the recent changes to website cookies and how third-party data is harvested and used, making contact with your customers is more important now than before.
When people understand how filling out a form or doing any other action on a website will benefit them, they are less reluctant to give their personal information – valuable information for your marketing and sales teams.
It is not always safe for customers to share personal data directly on social media channels. Still, you can add interactive elements that lead them to a page on your secure website.
For instance, a social post with visual content can have a link to an embedded quiz on your website. The visitor can fill it out with their personal information to win a prize. Once you have their contact details, your marketing and sales teams can remarket or convert them into paying customers.
Improve The Performance Of Ad Campaigns
Social media ad management is an entire area of expertise on its own, which we will not cover in this post. But we want to highlight how vital post engagement is for successful social ad campaigns.
92% of users say they have acted in the moment after seeing a product on Instagram.
There are usually two ways to create a social ad: creating an ad from scratch or sponsoring (also called “boosting”) an existing post. If you are already an Admin on a Facebook Page, you would have seen prompts to boost your best-performing posts in terms of engagement.
The opposite is also true; you can use social ads to reach more people in your relevant audiences and increase post engagement.
In either one of these scenarios, your social ads will show an increased return on investment (ROI) when optimized for audience interaction.
The ROI of social ads can be measured in a few ways, such as the number of clicks per post versus the cost of the campaign. You can also track how many post clicks led to conversions on your website.
7 Types Of Interactive Posts
We will look at seven types of interactive posts that you can use to drive more engagement on your social media account. We also point out how these interactive posts can be used to drive traffic to your website.
Types Of Interactive Posts:
- User-Generated Content (UGC)
- Video Content
- Calls To Action (CTAs)
- Gamified Content
- Polls And Quizzes
- Trending Hashtags
- Content Pieces
1. User-Generated Content (UGC)
People like sharing about themselves. Once you have prompted UGC in the form of post comments or reactions, the post becomes increasingly engaging. This is because your audience can interact with each other and exchange experiences and stories.
2. Video Content
Videos can be incredibly engaging. Not only are moving images eye-catching and entertaining, but they also convey a lot of information in a short amount of time.
You can measure your video content’s engagement by looking at the number of views and the average watch time.
Certain social media platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube, allow you to add interactive elements such as links and buttons to your video content.
3. Calls To Action (CTAs)
Every interactive post arguably has a CTA for the customer to do something. CTAs point the customer in the right direction, such as adding text that says, “Tap on the link below for more info.”
Brands use CTAs in social posts to make them interactive. Posts without CTAs or other interactive elements are called static content.
Static content can be broadcasts, company news, or product announcements. It conveys important information. Social media users will engage with these posts if they want to add their opinion or share the announcements with others.
The main difference between interactive posts and static content is that static content does not require the user to take any action. It comes across as one-sided, impersonal communication, making it more difficult for the audience to connect emotionally with the brand.
4. Gamified Content
Games are one of the best ways to encourage people to participate. There are various forms of gamification in social media that range from text prompts and interactive designs to real-world competitions and prizes.
Some of these forms of gamification can easily be run using the social media platform’s features.
Text prompts are well-received on Twitter, whereas interactive designs are more popular on Instagram. Both formats solicit social media comments to participate in the game.
It is almost standard procedure for brands to include giveaways and competitions in their social media strategies. Multiple game mechanics can be used, such as requiring the customer to leave a comment mentioning their friends’ accounts or to share a post mentioning the brand.
You can also create a game on your website and use social media posts to promote your competition and lead customers to your website. Our branded game platform enables you to create customized games and manage prizes while collecting valuable customer information.
5. Polls And Quizzes
To encourage more social media engagement, you can use the built-in poll and quiz features on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Chat apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat also enable running polls to get feedback from contacts.
Polls can turn any static content into an interactive post if the topic is relevant and interesting to your audience.
When running polls on your social media account, they do not always have to be relevant to your brand or products. They can also be about topics your audience finds interesting or current events such as extreme weather or music concerts.
Consider the pros and cons of using social media polls versus hosting a poll or survey on your own website.
6. Trending Hashtags
Initially proposed in 2007 by blogger Chris Messina on Twitter, hashtags are now used across social media platforms to group posts around certain topics.
Hashtagging makes finding and following relevant topics easier for social media users. It also enables them to find related posts that do not appear in their feed because of the social platform’s algorithm.
Companies use branded hashtags to run interactive campaigns such as competitions and series.
We briefly mentioned Twitter’s Trending Topics earlier in this post. If you follow a trending hashtag and include it in your social media content, your posts will also appear under the topic.
On Instagram, adding a hashtag to a public post adds it to the corresponding hashtag page. To stop users from spamming hashtag pages, Instagram does not publish posts or comments with more than 30 hashtags.
Remember to post using only relevant hashtags that make sense for your business. Otherwise, you will not reach the right audience. Make sure you have researched the context of a trending hashtag and that using it as a brand will not come across as ingenuine.
Once you have found a relevant trending hashtag, you can also apply interactive elements to your posts to boost engagement.
7. Content Pieces
Social media platforms allow for many types of content to be published and shared on a public forum, but blogs are still the best way to create in-depth, SEO-friendly content.
When you have published a piece of content on your website and want to share it with your social media audience, you can add a link to the post. You can add teaser text to your post to catch the reader’s attention, followed by a CTA to prompt tapping on the link.
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn create visual link previews that show the Open Graph (OG) image, title, and description of the blog post. The OG metadata protocol was created by Facebook to turn any website link into an interactive object. This makes the post much more visually appealing to the user.
Instagram does not include hyperlinks in posts and comments, which explains the use of “link in bio” in many posts. “Link in bio” tells the reader to navigate to the account profile and tap on the link under the bio to be redirected to the content.
A recent content-sharing feature that is gaining popularity is LinkedIn carousel posts. This feature enables you to create a slideshow of multiple images and videos in one post.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have allowed uploading multiple images and videos in one post for quite some time. But LinkedIn users are utilizing this feature to create compelling slideshows and engaging interactive posts.
Engaging Post Ideas For Your Next Campaign
We have explored what interactive posts are and the benefits of using them. We have also looked at the types of interactive posts and how they encourage audience engagement.
Now, we will share interactive post ideas to bolster your social calendar.
Interactive Post Ideas:
- Branded Games And Challenges
- Inspirational Quotes From Industry Leaders
- A Series Of Questions
- Funny Videos And Stories
- Sharing Valuable Tools You Have Used
- Resharing Relevant Content
- Asking Your Audience To Share Personal Experiences
- Actionable Insights
Branded Games And Challenges
Gamification is being used successfully in retail and other industries. You can use all the interactive features social media offers to engage your audience in gamified content.
We believe gamification is the future of interactive, data-driven marketing.
Our software is designed to create interactive posts on social media. You can add CTAs and links to branded games where people can play to win a prize or receive another type of reward.
Social media games can also be amplified by branded hashtags, paid ads, brand ambassadors, or influencer marketing.
Inspirational Quotes From Industry Leaders
Many brands post inspirational quotes on social media; some work well, and others do not. It depends on how well you know your audience and whether you bring fresh ideas.
For example, you may take a snippet from a podcast interview you did with an admired thought leader in your industry. Couple the text with on-trend branded designs or video footage to make an eye-catching post.
This will help you create unique, shareable content that will make your brand stand out from the many famous quotes shared on social media.
A Series Of Questions
Asking your audience for opinions on topics they are passionate about will show them that your company cares. You will also get valuable insights into their likes, needs, and behaviors.
Running a series of questions that engage your audience will build an active community around your brand with little effort. The topics should be relevant and elicit an emotional reaction from your customers.
Look at what problems your customers are trying to solve and form discussions around these. Your customer service conversations are a vital resource for extracting this information.
Funny Videos And Stories
It may not be one of the most original content ideas, but sharing funny stories on social media still works for interactive posts.
Not every post on your company’s page must be promotional or product-related. If your brand guidelines give leeway for some humor to be used, let your creative juices flow and share content that gives your company a personality.
Light-hearted content can help customers form an emotional connection to your brand and encourage them to comment or share these posts.
This is also an excellent way to get customers to share UGC around their own experiences and stories using your company’s owned hashtags.
Sharing Valuable Tools You Have Used
When you understand your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP), you will know what other tools and software they use. Sharing experiences of finding new tools or testing products can be an excellent way to earn new followers and customers.
Your audience may already be searching for information about tools related to your offering. If they find your posts helpful, they will likely view your company profile, follow or subscribe, and investigate your products and services.
It comes down to adding value for the customer and helping them solve their pain points.
Resharing Relevant Content
We have mentioned before that brands need to be aware of current events and incorporate newsworthy information into their social media strategy.
This also means that your social media team needs to be flexible and up-to-date.
Resharing other companies’ posts and commenting on the content can also be used to start discussions. Make sure the sources you reshare are trustworthy.
Asking Your Audience To Share Personal Experiences
Customer stories about real-life experiences are the true foundations of a brand.
Your values, vision, and mission have a lower impact when your customer experiences prove otherwise.
And it is acceptable to publish negative customer responses. People make mistakes, and brands are no different. Customers expect brands to hold a high moral standard and look at how they handle customer dissatisfaction.
When negative experiences are dealt with fairly, and companies make changes to improve future customer experiences, it builds profound trust.
Actionable Insights
You can collect data from your audience using the polling and quiz tools available or by running a quiz on your website.
Once you have garnered enough data, you can extract valuable insights to share with your audience. These can be visualized in various types of content: designs, infographics, videos, blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, and more.
Actionable insights are facts or statistics that can be acted on. For example, they can reveal customer experiences or behaviors that can immediately be improved.
Next Steps
Social media is an exceptional marketing tool for brands to engage their audience and find new customers.
Creating interactive posts will boost your social engagement rates, which offers several benefits.
Experiment with different platforms and post formats, and find which ones work well for your target audience. Trying different strategies and post ideas will help you gauge what forms of content your audience responds to.
You can also look at what your competitors are doing well and try to do it better or do something out of the box.
Brame offers a range of Game Concepts for you to customize to your campaign needs. You can embed tailored games and surveys on your website, share them on social media, and manage prizes on one helpful dashboard.
Make your own no-code branded game today.
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