The best way to boost engagement for your content is to know your audience better, focus on your purpose and goals, and improve the overall quality of what you produce. To make meaningful connections with your audience, you need to strategically plan your content marketing. It’s important to keep in mind what kinds of content are most likely to spark reaction. These are the formats and types of content most likely to get and hold your audience’s attention:
Content Formats:
- Video. For years now, video has been overtaking other content formats in popularity. Video holds attention longer than other formats and helps people learn, remember, and emotionally connect with messaging. Short form videos are the most popular format with the most engagement overall across channels. However, long videos and livestream videos also abound and get a lot of attention.
- Animations, gifs, and cinemagraphs. Like video, any kind of motion design holds attention and improves emotional connection to content. Custom animations elevate your brand, provide a personal touch, and leave a lasting impression on your audience. Even simple pre-made animations that come with content templates on apps like Canva and Adobe Express can make you stand out. Just be certain that you’re maintaining brand consistency, especially if you are inexperienced and using a free service. Most apps allow you to upload your brand color and fonts; I highly recommend that you use this feature.
- Images. Eye-catching visuals boost engagement. Good photos or illustrations on their own or paired with text pique interest and make people more likely to share your content. While certain audiences respond well to long blocks of text, most people on social media will scroll past posts that don’t have a visual component. Even a relevant stock photo can improve engagement.
- Carousels and multi-page documents. The interactive click-through nature of these posts has a wide appeal, especially on linkedIn, where it can be harder to predict what content will do well. Simple posts like “5 tips for success” with each tip on a new page to click through do extraordinarily well. Make sure you’re keeping a good visual balance on each page. Remember that more than half of the people engaging with the content are viewing it on a phone, so keep the text short and the fonts large enough to read.
- Infographics. People are hungry for facts, but they don’t have the attention span for reading dense reports on social media. If you can visually represent data in a way that’s interesting and appealing, people will pay attention and share the information.
Content Contents:
- Teaching. Educational materials like explainer videos, tutorials, and short tips are all popular kinds of content for boosting engagement. People love to learn in bite sized chunks. Bonus if you make your lessons visually appealing.
- Storytelling. Any kind of narrative (your journey, behind the scenes, even process or workflow) gets high engagement. People respond to story. This kind of content, particularly in video form, resonates with people because it makes them feel that they are personally connected to you. In turn, this boosts customer loyalty.
- Interactive. Any content that asks for or requires a response always has a good chance of getting engagement. Quizzes, polls, and questions are good examples of this type of content. TikTok videos requesting stitches, tweets asking for QT or RT, and any other content that makes a direct Call to Action all work well for boosting engagement.
- User-generated content. User-generated content serves two purposes: one, the content itself has a high engagement rate, and two, the content encourages people to make more user-generated content. Examples of this type of content are: testimonials and reviews, pictures posted by users in response to your prompt, and posts made with hashtags created by or about your brand.
- Giveaways and contests. Giveaways and contests are always great for engagement, particularly if you require the liking and sharing of posts as a condition of winning. This strategy also gives you access to the audience of everyone who shares your content, so it’s important to have the thing shared be memorable and truly representative of your brand.
Substance and Style 