Social media marketing is an effective strategy for every e-commerce business owner. However, there is a cutthroat race between your brands and your competition. So what makes you stand out from your competitors?
The simple answer is that you have to constantly create interactive posts on social media that drive engagement and potential traffic to your store. The most successful social media content creators keep getting more followers because they have mastered the art of building their brand and attracting attention. The chief art behind this is by posting interactive content. But it isn’t that straightforward.
Here’s all about creating interactive social media posts that drive engagements in 2022. Let’s get right into it!
What Are Interactive Posts?
An interactive post sparks a reaction from the intended audience. The responses could be a comment, share, like, or a particular action required from the post. All interactive posts have something in common — to engage readers and get a response from them. However, they may come in different formats (photos, videos, written posts).
Creating interactive posts may not be as simple as you think. You should understand these two basic things:
- The marketing goal you want to achieve
- Your target audience
Understanding these will increase the chances of your social media campaign being fruitful to a great extent. Taking advantage of the benefit of interactive content is essential for every aspect of your business, from gaining customer trust to getting those sales targets.
5 Benefits of Social Media Interactive Posts
Social media posts have a lot of short-term and long-term benefits for your e-commerce business. They include:
1. Comprehensive Participation
Any e-commerce business owner knows that content is king on all social media platforms. So when you post quality content, there is a high chance that people will interact with it. It might just be a simple comment or like, but everything counts, increasing your brand's visibility.
The higher your content’s quality, the more engagement. This does not apply to e-commerce business owners alone. It applies to all content creators. So when more people interact with your content, they also most likely participate in your business.
2. Breeds Connection
Connection is essential in any business. You have to connect with your audience and customers. When you understand what kind of content gets you more engagement, assembling social media campaign ideas will be much easier.
The more posts you create, the more you will be able to understand what your audience wants and what they relate to more. It could be inspirational, emotional, funny, or an idea on a contentious topic. As long as they are engaging, you are reaching out and making an impact.
3. Demographic Data Through Engagement
There is a reason behind every social media marketing campaign. When you create interactive posts, and people engage with them, you know their reactions and what they like. Those reactions are essential information that online store owners can gather and leverage. Collecting this information will help you make suitable decisions regarding your business.
4. Breeds Loyalty
Quality content matters to your audience. It is also important to you as an online store owner. When you post interactive content, you attract more loyal people to your brand. People are attracted when you create interactive posts promoting exceptional products and services.
5. Increased Traffic and Potential Sales
Social media, in general, is essential in any e-commerce business. The main marketing strategies (web traffic and brand awareness) will be fruitful if appropriately optimized on social media. After their interactive post, most online store owners usually add a call to action. So when the audience engages with the post, they are likely to click on the button, leading them to the online store.
Photo by Jeremy Levin
9 Types of Interactive Post Ideas for Social Media
There are several contents on the Internet. Here are seven primary post ideas that can drive engagement on your social media platforms:
1. Giveaways and Contests
Social media users love to try their luck. Therefore, a great way to get them to respond to you is through a contest. Many brands use this effective strategy to increase their social media engagement. According to a study, 91 % of posts on Instagram related to contests have more than 1000 likes or comments. Pages that include contests in their posts tend to grow faster than pages that do not.
A contest is an excellent strategy, but what if you spice it with giveaways or prices? There’s a higher chance that the engagement will be doubled or tripled. An adventurous brand like Nature’s Eats constantly conducts contests with a prize. A notable one was their instagram contest aimed at promoting their new product launch – Nutchos. Nature’s Eats told participants to tag their friends as a comment on their contest post. After this, the participants were to re-post on their strory to get extra entries. These kinds of contests are straightforward, helping you engage with followers while gaining new ones.
2. Appealing Infographics
Visual content often draws people's attention more than text, especially on social media. Fact has it that people remember 20% of what they read and 80% of what they see. Appealing Infographics is one of the ways to prompt engagement and help people remember your content.
Infographics make your post more attractive and increase engagement. It can be in the form of pop-ups, informative content, click-through to other landing pages, etc. You can even use infographics for your giveaways and contests to attract more people.
3. Polls and Survey
The audience believes more in your post when you make them feel that their opinions matter and it can make a difference. This feeling will make them interested and engage in your post. Surveys and Polls can be on any topic. You can ask anything ranging from a change in a product’s characteristics to a change in how you manage your business. It can even be about happenings in the world.
Polls and surveys are effective social media interactive posts ideas, depending on the type of question. Aside from getting engagement with your post, you also get insightful details about your audience.
4. Quizzes
If the analytics is right, testing the audience with quizzes is one of the best ways to draw the audience to your interaction. It is even better if it is a scoring quiz, ranging from personality quizzes to entertainment-based quizzes, trivia, knowledge found, or games. For example, Buzzfeed uses all kinds of eccentric quizzes to create effective engagement for the brand. The platform is well known for most of the examinations many of us took, letting us know our spirit animal cartoon character based on the kind of coffee we like.
Although you might not believe in them, you still find yourself answering them because they are fun. Many other brands aside from Buzzfeed can testify to the wonders that quiz has brought them. You can also try different kinds of quizzes to see which one your audience enjoys the most. This way, you will increase your chances of getting engagements.
5. Go LIVE
One simple way of getting engagement through social media interactive posts is by going LIVE. All social media platforms have a “live” feature where you can communicate with your audience. Celebrities and famous influencers usually go live to reach tons of viewers who comment or directly chat on the stream. A live session is the best place to unbox or unveil a new product. It is flexible, and you can do it anywhere in your car, bedroom, kitchen, etc.
Live sessions can also include productive programs like discussions and webinars by collaborating with other personalities. This is just like directly conversing with your audience. If you own a fashion brand, you can talk about your product, use it, entertain questions, and invite celebrities to promote it.
6. Content Ratings
It is no news that people love to express their minds. You can allow your audience to express their opinion by asking for the rating of your post on social media accounts in general. Asking for ratings will increase your post engagement because everyone wants to drop their idea.
However, you have to brace yourself for what is to come because you might come across hateful ratings. The benefit is that if you get high ratings, you can post them on other social media platforms or websites to build authority and trust. On the flip side, negative ratings will help you know where and what to improve.
7. Interactive Maps
Interactive maps that allow the audience to move, pan around, zoom in, and zoom out for extra details are a great form of engagement. The more information you include in your map, the more time the audience spends interacting with your content.
8. Jokes and Memes
Some of the most abundant content on social media are memes because virtually everyone loves good, subtle jokes. Funny and humorous interactive posts are important when looking for more engagement on your social media post.
You can complement your business post with memes, but remember that it has to be related to your line of business. Bugles is one of the brands killing it with their meme game. This crispy chips brand posts memes regularly and often ensures their product shows in the image. This strategy increases the engagement they get on their social media posts.
9. Teach Them How it's Done
Social media users love tutorials and DIY videos. People no longer ask questions about stuff anymore; they'll rather watch tutorial videos to find answers. These videos can be short-term or long-term. It depends on your brand requirements. For example, there are tons of makeup videos available online. You can watch some of these videos and become a pro.
As an e-commerce store owner, you can create videos relating to your products or the industry. Your video and context style has to be the same. You don't want to look unserious or untrustworthy by posting different unrelated content across social media platforms.
Photo by JESSICA TICOZZELLI
How to Create Social Media Interactive Post?
Creating an interactive post is not easy, unlike posting a random photo with a regular caption or tweeting a random thought. Here are three important things to do to ensure your post are interactive and your engagement rate increases:
1. Create a Strategy
As with other aspects of content marketing, the interactive post has to be consistent, and it must relate to your target audience. When picking a niche or topic for your interactive post, make sure they resonate with your viewers and audience.
For example, if you are into fashion, a post relating to sports may not catch your audience's attention. But an infographic interactive post relating to sportswear or uniforms will pique your audience's interest.
2. Have Efficient Content Creators in Place
Anyone can post anything on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, but creating interactive posts requires expertise. It requires more than just thinking and hitting the post button; you need some skills. As an e-commerce store owner, you may not have the necessary skills, so you may need professional content creators in place.
For example, you may need the service of a professional writer to create the texts and a graphic designer to visualize the content. If you want to upload a video, you need someone with editing and filming skills. If you don't have people with these skills, you can hire freelancers for the job you do. If the budget is too much to handle, you can stick to the kind of post you can create yourself.
3. Examine Your Result
No matter the kind of post you create, it is essential to analyze everyone to ensure it is successful. After creating a social media interactive post and you get engagement, ask yourself the following:
- Did the post increase my followers?
- Did the post increase engagement?
- Did the post increase traffic to my online store?
- Did the post increase sales?
When you take the time to go through each post, it will direct you to the future. It is also another way to compare and contrast various formats of interactive posts and pick which one is the most effective.
Photo by Pixabay
Final Thoughts
Your potential customers are all over social media platforms, and it is up to you to find them. One way to create awareness for your brand on social media is by posting interactive content. Interactive posts offer several benefits to your business, ranging from comprehensive participation to brand loyalty and increased traffic and sales. Choose one or a couple of interactive post ideas described in this guide to improve your engagement today.
(Contributed by Ayotomiwa Omotosho & Hermes Fang)
