What is engaging content? (with 7 guiding tips)
What is engaging content? Why is it important? Let’s take a closer look at engaging content to better your social media content creating skills.
Engaging content has many meanings depending on the purpose of the content. Engaging content in general and engaging content for social media are different. And the way to achieve them are also different as well.
Today, we are going to take a look at the definitions of engaging content, its importance, and easy tips to achieve engaging content for social media.
- What is engaging content?
- Why do you need engaging content?
- Tips for creating engaging content for social media
- Final Thoughts
What is engaging content?
Engaging content in general has very broad and varied definitions. Each writer may have a different view on what really is engaging content. However, there are some shared characteristics of engaging content.
Engaging content is the content that can attract the reader from other things and keep them reading your content. It should be relevant and needed by the audience. It must be beneficial to the audience in some ways, whether it is to entertain them or solve their problems and questions. Engaging content could be able to trick the reader into thinking that this content is important to know or good to know. It should play with readers emotions to keep them engaged and curious of what is there in the content.
Now, let’s look at the definition of engaging content for social media.Engaging content for social media will relate with the social media engagement rate that come from interactions on social media. So, Engaging content for social media is simply the content that will drive people to interact with the posts or contents. However, in order to gain those interactions, your content will need to be attractive and interesting as described above for engaging content.
Why do you need engaging content?
As we mentioned many times before, content is the most important thing on your sites, both websites and social media. Contents are there to convey messages from brands to the audience. Which is why you need to make sure that the audience will read your content. This is where engaging content plays the part.
To have engaging content will help keep your audience interested and continue reading your content. It allows your brand to show your excellence and expertise, it allows you to persuade the audience to buy your products, use your services, or take any actions you want them to. The boring and non-engaging content will bore your audience and make them leave your site.
Not only that engaging content will make your audience read and interested in your content, it also attracts new audiences which may become future customers as well. If you can make the content sound important and valuable, more people will be attracted to your social media and websites.
Another important benefit of having engaging content is that it drives more social media engagement such as likes, share, and comments. These interactions will make your social media site have strong social media presence and brand awareness. It makes your sites become authoritative.
Tips for creating engaging content for social media
These tips will help you turn your content to be more engaging, and maybe gain more engagement actions such as likes, shares, and comments from your followers.
Use questions
The first tip is the technique that is used widely in both blogs and social media posts writing. It has been proven to work well drawing people into the site and also keeping them engaged and interested in reading. This technique is to ask questions.
Asking questions in written content sound super simple and many might overlook it. Asking questions is one of the effective ways to play with people’s curiosity. Curiosity will keep them reading more and more until they get the answers.
The questions used for this technique are those that keep the readers thinking of the answer, it is mostly open-ended questions. It could be ones that the readers will likely have about the topics. And it should be the questions that you will be answering in the content.
Apart from using questions as part of the content, you can also use questions straight up as social media posts to make your followers comment on their answers too. It is the easiest way to have your followers comment on your posts, while also giving you a chance to learn more about your audience as well.
Asking questions is easy and very effective. Which is why it is used by almost every writer. Did you notice that we also gave you this tip in this article as well?
Create activities or challenges
One type of content that will bring millions of social media engagement to your brand is the ones where people get to participate in. It could be challenges, contests, or just fun activities.
These types of activities are used often in every social media platform, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Brands will use this type of content to gain more likes and maybe reach more people to get more followers.
If you could not picture this type of content, think about when brands have their followers, like and share their post to get random giveaways,free samples, or discounts in return. Or when the brand asks their customers to share their reviews in the comment section. These are examples of how challenges are used to make the content more engaging.
Less texts, more visuals
It is a fact that people do not like to read super long text-oriented posts. They will scroll past those posts really quickly. But if you use visual aids to replace texts, they are more likely to be interested and read your posts.
Text only posts are boring and not attractive for most readers. If you use pictures, graphs, or tables to help you present the information, they are more likely to keep reading, plus it is better for their understanding as well.
The images used on social media posts should be eye-catching and high quality. It will be even better if you use your own pictures and graphics. Good images should use beautiful colors and designs. Research to find the trend of graphics and photos to make images in your content standout and preferable by readers.
Share stories
Another type of content that is considered engaging is stories. People love reading and listening to stories more than reading lists or chunks of information.
When we say ‘story’, what comes to your mind? What kind of story should be used in social media posts? The stories in this case means any content, you just need to write it in the form of storytelling.
You could use the story of how you came up with the products or history of your brand. The story of your customers will work well for this tip as well. Try retelling customers’ experience such as their problems and how your products can solve their problems. Product reviews are considered a story as well.
Hop on trends
One way to make engaging content is to hop on the current trend that gets attention from millions of people. Creating content that relates to current trends will drive more people and social media interactions to your social media sites.
Posts that merge your expertise with trendy topics will draw attention of both your present audience and other audience from the trendy topics as well.
Use various types of content
To use various types of content means to switch up between texts, videos, pictures, and other things. Doing this will create excitement for your audience, since posting the same thing over and over can be boring and will make your audience lose interest in no time.
Not only switching up, but using multiple types of content in one post will also do the trick as well. Using more than one kind of media will make the audience feel excited and want to read more of your content. Plus, if you are using it right, they will always click like.
Include Call to Action words
The last tip is very straightforward. It is to use Call to Action words. Call to action are words or phrases that tell the audience what you want them to do.
Most of the time, the audience read your amazing content but they do not feel encouraged or feel the need to take any action. But if you use call to action words, they might do that.
Call to action is easy to use and very straightforward, you do not need to be creative nor pretentious to use this tip at all. Call to action can be as forward as ‘Please like and share our post if you enjoy it.’ or ‘ Don’t forget to like and follow my page’.
Final Thoughts
Engaging content is important for every business nowadays since there are tons of posts from the competitors everyday. It is crucial to male sure your content works well in pleasing your audience. There are many benefits from putting time and effort into creating engaging content and it will be easier if you know a few good tricks to help you achieve that goal.