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How to Leverage Interactive Posts for Social Media? 

If you are looking for effective ways to improve your engagement on social media, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog, we are going to discuss how you can engage better with interactive posts for social media. But before getting into the core, let us first understand why exactly we need social media marketing.

With almost 59% of the world’s population using social media, you should not let go of your chance to get traffic from there. Through social media marketing, you can reach out to a large number of people within seconds of posting your content. This will not only help you increase your reach but also to boost your engagement and conversion rates.

Now without further ado, let’s dive into the blog!

What is an Interactive Social Media Post?

An interactive post for social media, as the name suggests, is a piece of interactive content that creates a two-way conversation between your brand and social media users. This type of content requires active engagement on the part of the users rather than just scrolling through without actually reading the content. And in return for their active participation, users get instant, personalized results that they care about!

Benefits of Interactive Posts for Social Media

As compared to the usual, static advertisements and articles, interactive social media content offers a lot of benefits to marketers. A well-formed strategy by social media marketing experts can support increased engagement and branding. Let’s talk about some of them-

1. Boosts Engagement

Interactive content provides the users with an opportunity to participate and share their opinion. Thus, creating social media posts that pique their interest, will not only bring more engagement but will also encourage them to share your content.

2. Increases Brand Loyalty

Interactive content creates a unique experience for each user and tops it off by providing personalized, hyper-relevant results in real-time. This will help set your brand apart from your competitors compelling your users to come back, thus increasing your brand loyalty.

3. Helps Capture Valuable Data

The most important benefit of interactive posts for social media is that it helps in lead generation. Through such content, you can easily capture user data that can further guide your marketing efforts such as lead nurturing and retargeting campaigns.

Now that we’ve talked about the benefits, let’s see what are the types of interactive content that you can create for your social media posts.

Types of Interactive Content

1. Quizzes

Quizzes are the most efficient way to gather information on your audience and give out some value to them, both at the same time. You can simply do this through a set of random questions and by providing relevant results in return.

Quiz

2. Calculators

A calculator is an advanced and powerful type of interactive content. Based on the responses provided by the users, it makes some calculations and gives out a highly personalized, quantitative result.

Calculator

3. Surveys

Surveys are low-cost evaluative tools used for collecting information. This type of interactive content is generally used for creating feedback, market surveys, job applications, etc.

Forms/surveys

4. Contests/Giveaways

Giveaways have proven to be a great way to promote products and services. Through a giveaway, you can give out rewards to the participants either randomly or based on some contest. This provides an incentive to the target audience, so they do not hesitate to share their user information! A unique gift set including a  custom product with your brand’s name is also great to boost brand recognition.

Giveaway

5. Polls

The main purpose of interactive content is to allow users to participate and voice their opinions. With polls, a user can do so with just a single click. Because of its simplicity and no time demand, polls are one of the most engaging types of interactive content.

Polls

Now that we have discussed the different content types, let’s move on to the very core of this blog and learn about some popular practices for interactive marketing on social media-

Best Practices for Interactive Social Media Posts

In order to captivate users, you need to power your social media marketing with interactive content. This will help you create more opportunities for interaction with your prospects, lure new followers, re-engage your existing fan base, and familiarize them with your business. To top it all, you will also gently nudge them deeper into your marketing funnel. Let’s see how you can do that.

1. Publish it on Your Social Timeline

Facebook influences buying decisions 7 times more than other social platforms combined. This clearly points to the fact that if you engage your social media users right, nothing can keep you from converting them into customers! Since social media engagement is the key here, it is a good idea to include more interactive posts for social media like an online survey.

People are quite done with the unidirectional flow of information reflected in blogs, e-books, and white papers. They want a more immersive and dynamic experience, which interactive experiences promise. So how about posting more interactive-cum-educational-cum-fun quizzes, calculators, and assessments on your timeline. Additionally, you can also incorporate a timeline creator to create timeline infographics that communicate your brand story.

You will see the number of shares, likes, and comments skyrocket (think viral)! You will also notice an increase in social media click-throughs, so you can direct more users to your website to continue interacting with them! Look at BuzzFeed! They get 42% of their website traffic from social media!

Buzzfeed

Twitter has over 190,000,000 visitors each month, hence it is only imperative to leverage it for driving more traffic. One way is by promoting your interactive experience on Twitter. But how do you go about this?

Some of the ways you can include interactive experiences in your Twitter feed is by tweeting a quiz, a calculator, an interactive PDF, or an assessment link.

Furthermore, when you are drafting the tweet try to keep it under 100 characters, preferably in a question form as questions have 1,050% more replies than quotes. You can also ask for a retweet as you will then have a 12x higher chance of being retweeted.

Outgrow Tech Quiz

2. On Facebook’s Custom Tab

Have you seen newspapers and magazines with a dedicated section for sports, lifestyle, editorial opinion, etc? A custom tab on Facebook is exactly the same. It loads inside Facebook (no redirections) and you can display pretty much everything that you want there. It appears alongside the default tabs like ‘About’, ‘Likes’, ‘Events’, ‘Video’, and other social apps that you may already have on your page.

While you can totally publish your interactive content from social media on your FB timeline, we think it deserves a standalone spot on your business page. One of the advantages of giving it the hot spot on your profile is that it won’t drown under the weight of other posts on your timeline!

Also, 86% of B2B buyers now prefer interactive content from marketers. So, it makes sense you make it easy for a Facebook lurker (and your followers) to be able to spot interactive experiences easily on one of the tabs. They would love to engage with you through a piece of content they most prefer! You can learn how to add a tab on your business page with the help of the video below.

How to add custom tab in a facebook page

3. Think Ads

(a) Use in PPC Advertisements

You can take your PPC ads to the next level and make them irresistible for your audiences using interactive experiences. Reason? Interactive content converts 2x more than passive content! In fact, research also suggests that internet users pay more attention to interactive ads.

So, it’s a good idea is to use interactive content in social media marketing as your ad’s CTA. However, make sure you test different versions of the ad. It will help you understand what’s working and make the most of your ad budget. Optimize your ad by using strong industry keywords. Promise them an experience that is engaging and entertaining.

Outgrow Quiz

(b) Facebook Lead Generation Ads

Facebook lead gen ads are helping businesses make the mobile signup process easier and faster, thus reducing drop-offs. With that taken care of, it’s a sure-shot way of making your business stand out among the numerous posts and click-bait ads a user sees every day.

Upon clicking the ad CTA, a pre-populated lead gen form will pop-up on the user’s mobile screen with information that they have already shared with Facebook like their name and email address. If you want to gather more data you can add more fields.

The newly generated leads can be synced with your CRM and your sales team can begin taking necessary actions. But, what about the interactive content we promised them? You can add a link to these experiences on the screen that users see after submitting their information or redirect them to a landing page or the blog where you’ve embedded your content.

(c) Sponsored Posts on Facebook

Why boost a post when you can actually publish it for free on your timeline, right? That’s because there’s been a steep drop in the organic reach of Facebook posts over the last couple of years. Facebook’s algorithms have decreased the reach of organic posts- The average organic reach for a Facebook post is 6.4% of the page’s likes. Fewer people seeing your post means fewer likes, clicks, shares, and comments; all of which result in fewer conversions. So, if you really want to reach your target audience, start sponsoring your interactive content.

By boosting interactive experiences you will not only increase its visibility to your followers but also generate interest. After all, interactive content is educational, attention-grabbing and it converts! The living proof of it bringing results is a quiz created on Outgrow by a digital startup, TAG Livros.

The quiz had just one question and a simple landing page which increased its completion rate. When they boosted the post on Facebook, it generated 900 likes/reactions and 120 shares! This wouldn’t have been possible by just sharing it on the timeline!

Book Quiz

(d) Re-engage With a Sponsored Message

A sponsored message will help you re-engage with your prospects. This message can only be sent to those with whom you have already connected over messenger. All you have to do is choose sponsored messages as a ‘placement’ in ads manager or the Ads API.

Let’s take an example. Imagine you are a dealer for used cars. Someone expressed an interest in buying from you, but the conversation didn’t go anywhere after the first round of chat. You can give them a shout-out using a sponsored message.

Your audience will see messenger ads on the home screen of the messenger app on their mobiles. Instead of saying, “Hey, are you still interested”, you should send them a message with a “How much you can save buying from us” calculator link. Display comparative results so that they know that you were right about them saving money!

(e) Click on Messenger Ads

The click to messenger ads redirects your prospect when they click on the ad to a messenger chat. Say, you are an SEO expert and want your prospects to avail your expertise for a minimal fee for a 15-day period. Draft an ad copy stating the same but withhold some information that you can reveal in the chat.

Once they start chatting with you, you can respond with: “Thanks for clicking on my ad! I’m glad you have expressed interest in knowing more about the offer. The minimal fee that I am going to charge is $80, but you can continue to leverage benefits by switching plans that suit your budget after the trial period. While you are still deciding, why don’t you calculate “How much it will cost to hire compared to having an in-house team”.

Another good example of this social media marketing technique is, “Should you hire a PPC agency or go in-house?

4. Optimize Your Facebook Messenger

As per Facebook data, more than 2 billion messages (people-initiated and automated) get shared between businesses and people every month! The question now is: are you making the best use of FB messenger for your social media marketing? If not, then you should immediately enable messaging for your business page and spice up your initial conversation with the help of interactive facebook posts!

(a) Welcome them to your page

You can send an instant welcome message to someone who is interacting with your page for the very first time. It will appear even before any messages exchange happens between you and your prospect. For the message to strike a chord with them, use a friendly tone.

For instance, if you are a real estate agent, you can say, “Welcome to X! Are you looking to buy a house? You may want to begin by taking the ‘Am I ready to buy a house?’ quiz.

By redirecting them to a quiz you keep the prospect entertained and engaged with your brand. You can then steer the conversation based on your chat with the prospect.

If you’re running short of ideas for interactive posts for social media marketing, you should definitely give our Idea Generator tool a try!

(b) Use Instant Replies

What is the first thing you do when you meet someone? You greet each other, right? Thanks to technology, you can do the same on your Facebook business page through instant replies.

Instant replies are messages that automatically get sent as the first response to an incoming message. Even though it’s an auto-response, It not only helps you set the tone for your future interaction but also lets your prospects know how soon to expect your reply.

An example of a good instant reply (made more effective using interactive content) for a tour and travel company: “Hey! Thank you for reaching out to us! We will touch base with you within six working hours or even surprise you in the next couple of minutes! In the meantime, why don’t you take our “Which city should you holiday in summer?” Talk soon!” As you can see, try to write an instant reply in the same manner as you would speak in person.

5. Connect With Prospects and Peers Alike: Post Interactive Content in Comments

We stumbled upon a tweet by Arteen Arabshahi wherein he posted a link to a cheat sheet to a marketplace evaluation calculator. The users could use it by inputting values in excel. Although it was a brilliant resource, we found that it was a little difficult to input values for all the questions in the excel sheet.

Twitter

To reduce a user’s effort, we thought of converting the excel content into a calculator. We then posted the link to the calculator as a reply to his tweet.

Twitter

Arteen was pleasantly surprised to see how easy the calculator was to use!

Marketplace Evaluation Calc

You too can do something similar. Although you don’t have to necessarily create new, interactive experiences, you should definitely post your existing interactive content in relevant posts as comments.

The keyword here is ‘relevant’ because we don’t want you to spam people. For example, let’s imagine you are an architect based out of Texas. Courtesy social media listening, you came across a tweet by someone asking about how much it will cost to redesign my home in Texas. Ideally, instead of hard-selling your services, you can give the prospect a calculator link that answers the question.

One such calculator can be a “Find out how you will save by hiring our firm to redesign your home” or a “Find out the cost of redesign” calculator. Get the drift? This will essentially position you as a problem solver and help you generate more leads.

While we are talking about comments, make sure you actively monitor comments and respond timely.

In fact, the importance of social media monitoring should not be undermined altogether. In simplest terms, social media monitoring tracks comments, mentions, followers, trending topics, and more. Monitoring these activities makes everything simpler.

Outgrow quizzes

6. Group Marketing Because it Takes Two To Tango!

Another way you can gain visibility is by posting your interactive content on groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. So, get around to actively searching for niche groups that have decent followership and cater to your industry. Usually, closed groups are where quality conversations happen. It is better to start off by becoming a member of these groups because there are fewer chances of being exposed to spam content.

Once you join the shortlisted groups, don’t start posting links to your interactive content straightaway. Spend a few days interacting with the group members. Post thoughtful comments that add value to those reading the blog and interacting in comments. Once you’ve made your expert opinion heard only then start sharing your quiz and calculator.

Conclusion

Overall, getting users to engage with your brand is critical for your success on any social networking platform! As you would have guessed, one way to do so is by integrating interactive posts for social media into your marketing strategy. However, if you are already doing it then we’re all ears to hear your experiences! Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

General CTA

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