Learn how to Create Engaging Social Media Content: 12 Tips to Drive Results

Muskan Jhanwar

7 min readSep 30, 2020

Struggling to gain more attention of your social media audience?

With 3.8 billion users, social media platforms have placed you in front of a huge audience.

But does your audience love your content?

Because it’s one thing to be seen by them.

It’s another to get their wholehearted support.

Plus, social media platforms were created for connections, not selling.

To gain your attention of your audience, you need to compete against posts from their friends, DMs from their family, and tons of cute cat photos.

Show, Don’t Tell

Ever stopped scrolling on social media just to read a huge wall of text?

You know, something like this.

I bet you haven’t. (Unless it was posted by your ex.)

But when brands post like this?

That’s right, you shoot straight past them.

The message of this story is clear: if you’re marketing your brand on social, make it a rule to add an image to everything you post.

Get creative for your brand

Post photos that speak to your audience in real and watch those likes and comments rise.

Get Your Photos Taken

If you’re using stock photos in your social media posts, it’s time to stop right now.

Why?

Stock photos doesn’t perform well as compared to real photos.

The result?

Visitors who saw the real photo were 35% more likely to sign up.

Below are three tips for social media images:

Hire a photographer to take your photos that match the editorial calendar.
If you’re just starting, you can take your photos with a high-specs smartphone.
Make sure your images is matching the text around. Images are meant to summarize concepts and drive home points, not simply to break up the text.

Recycle Your Evergreen Content into Graphics

Do you know that people remember visual information 65% longer as compared to the text?

Start improving your PPC performance today:

To grab the advantage of this, repurpose your best pieces of evergreen content into infographics, charts, graphs, and social media images.

Here’s an example of a social media infographic…

…graph…
…chart…
…and image…

When creating graphics, remember these tips:

Showcase your content’s main points.
Pull quotes from your content or reword your main points to make them sharable.
Use tools like Canva and Piktochart for quality graphics.

Share Customer Testimonials & Reviews

Imagine this.

You’re about to buy a new product, but you want to learn more about it first.

When searching for information, who do you trust?

A salesperson selling the product?
or an honest review from a customer?

If you picked the first option, you’re in a small pool of just 3% of buyers.

The rest of us are scouring online review sites to learn the truth about a product. The average buyer reads seven reviews before purchasing a new brand.

If this says anything to you as a marketer, it’s that reviews from happy customers are powerful magnets at your disposal.

And while you’ve probably already posted them on your website and blog, make sure not to leave social media out.

Pick out the best testimonials and reviews, design them into readable bites, and frame catchy captions that go on ride together.

Search for the Latest Visual Trends

You want to post tons of visuals on social media, but first, you need to know which visuals work and which don’t.

To find out, dig up visual trends on social media platforms and Google search.

Here’s how:

Visit Pinterest’s Most Repinned Page: This page shows you the pins users love.
Search using the most popular hashtags on Instagram: For instance, #love is the most popular hashtag on Instagram with over a billion posts. Go through the posts with this hashtag and note down the ones with high engagement.
Do a Google search for popular image trends: You can check through top-ranking sites to learn about image trends.

Host Contests

A infallible and fast way to grow your audience and gain tons of engagement is through running social media contests.

Here are three that work:

Like, comment, and share to join: Users like your post and share it with their friends to enter your contest.
Tag a friend: The more friends your audience tags, the more entries they get.

I advice you to always stick on the contest rules set by each social media platform. As each social media platform has its different rules, review them first before spending time framing your contest.

Here are some to be aware of:

Contest Rules on Instagram and Facebook

You are responsible for the lawful operations of your contests (eligibility requirements, official rules, and regulations around prizes).
You shouldn’t ask users to inaccurately tag photos (for example, don’t ask users to tag photos if they don’t appear in them).
You should admit that your contest is not sponsored by Instagram or Facebook.

Go here for the full list of Instagram’s contest rules, and here for a full list of Facebook’s rules.

Contest Rules on Twitter

Don’t encourage users to create multiple accounts (for example, users may create multiple accounts to receive multiple entries to your contest).
Don’t ask users to post the same tweet over and over again (avoid “whoever retweets this post most wins”).
Stay away from content that jeopardizes users’ safety such as content containing violence, abuse, terrorism, hateful conduct, and adult content.
Stay away from spam and don’t post other people’s private information.

Check out this guide for the complete list of Twitter’s contest rules.

Contest Rules on Snapchat

Don’t use Snapchat’s trademarks and logos.
Don’t encourage illegal, illicit, or spammy behavior.

Tag Influencers You’ve Quoted in Your Message

Making use of quotes from influencers in your blog is a great way to spark engagement.

But don’t stop there.

Make sure to give the influencers you quoted credit by mentioning them on social media.

Tag them on social media with a link to your content.
Create an enticing graphic and tag the influencer in a social message.

They’ll surely appreciate it! Plus, it’s a great way to gain the attention of their followers.

Add Social Media Buttons to Your Email Newsletters

Think social media and email are competing for marketing channels?

Think again.

Social media and email work hand-in-hand.

One great way to use them together is to add social media buttons to your email newsletters.

This idea works because readers merely scan emails, and buttons stand out from text in an alluring, eye-catchy way.

Use the Right Hashtags

When used wisely, hashtags can put you in front of a much wider audience.

For instance, using hashtags on Instagram makes your post appear on that hashtags page.

But remember, hashtags don’t work equally on all social platforms. For example, you may gain huge engagement on Instagram and very less engagement on Facebook.

Follow this guide on how many hashtags to use on each social platform:

Twitter: 1–2
Facebook 1–2
Instagram: 5–10
Pinterest: 2–5

Spark It Up with Stories

Should you take the time to post stories on Instagram and Facebook?

The short answer, yes.

The longer one: with over 500 million people saying they use Instagram Stories every day and 62% of consumers saying they discovered a new brand through stories, you just don’t want to miss it.

Plus, stories can be fun and inspiring.

Add Puzzles, Quizzes & Riddles

Is this you?

You’re worked up with 100 projects for work and 200 assignments from your night college professor.

But instead of hammering into them right away…

…you take a quiz to find out what kind of cheese you are...!

(Yup, that’s me too. Just kidding. I don’t have 100 projects for work.)

The fact is, quizzes are Irresistible.

So if you want to enjoy the more engagement, start planing a fun, challenging and a unique quiz or riddle and post it on your social media account as a posts.