At Last, The Secret To Engagement On Social Media Is Revealed
As much as I’d like, offering a free pastry or donut to increase the reach of your posts on social media is just not going to work. This post is to help you figure out exactly why your blog posts, facebook posts or tweets aren’t getting the shares and comments that your awesome value deserves, and more importantly how to turn that around with 5 valuable post types.

It’s no secret that content marketing (i.e. creating & distributing relevant and valuable content) is the new norm if you want to be taken seriously in the online space. You need to show that you know what you’re talking about, that you care about what you do and who you do it with, and that you have a voice worth listening to. It’s the first rung in the ladder to creating an audience that ultimately want more of what you have on offer i.e. your professional services. Savvy businesses have been doing this for many years, and with the tools of the internet age at our disposal, there is an ever-increasing number of people who are creating super strong personal brands and very successful businesses around what content they share on their websites and Social Media channels.

But with every business who truly wants to succeed in the online space now dedicating resources to this, the fact is that you have to fight harder to stand out from the crowd. It’s not enough to simply throw out an opinion on industry legislation, market changes, or the technical insights to your craft (but then again, was it ever enough to talk about that stuff with your audience?)

You may have noticed this in your own digital playpen. You write a great blog post, throw it out on Twitter or Facebook…. and nothing!  No-one likes it, no-one comments, no-one shares. It can be rather disheartening!

So in the sea of digital noise out there, how do you and your business stand out?

Well, as always, you should be writing content that is engaging, timely, relevant and above all personal, spoken in your own voice.

But there is a certain aspect of the human condition that will always trump reading or watching content. And that’s interacting with content. – Click To Tweet Here

Interactive content is a very simple concept, yet it is incredibly under utilized. It uses the objective of creating a piece of media that allows a human to… interact with it, funnily enough.
Let’s say you’ve got a blog post. At the end of that blog post, you ask the reader to like the post via social media buttons and they click ‘like’. You’ve just helped them put the ‘interactive’ in ‘interactive media’. Maybe you have an opinion about how you can use ‘dead time’ during the commute to work to increase your productivity. At the end of the article, you ask for the reader to give their opinions, and encourage input. As soon as they start typing their comment, you’ve benefited from interactive media.

The problem is, that most businesses, even the ones who actually create great blog posts, email series or videos, fail to encourage audience participation and in this day and age, it is the likes, comments, and shares that will maximise the power of your content. Not only does it solidify the relationship between yourself and that ‘interactor’, but it puts your content in front of their peers which opens you up to more and more people as well.

So how do you start making your awesome content more interactive? Well here are five interactive media ideas that you can start using right now. Some are as simple as asking a question, some take a bit more planning and time, but all help give you the best chance of using Social Media more like a telephone and less like a megaphone.

FIVE INTERACTIVE MEDIA IDEAS

1. Posts that encourage opinions or ask questions

It’s easy to spit out your knowledge, expertise and experiences for someone to read, but go one step further and seek the comments and opinions of those who read it. Using a social media platform like Facebook or LinkedIn also gives that post the best opportunity to show up in the feeds of your connections, as well as your connections’ connections, extending your reach beyond your network. Have a look at the number of comments this post in The Social Adviser’s LinkedIn Group; Social Media For Professional Advisers garnered.

People love to help others and also give you their ‘two cents worth’. Why not give them a platform to make it super easy to do both of these things at once?

2. Posts with an incentive

We’ve all seen the big brands put a competition on via social media i.e. “Like this and go in the draw to win…” These can certainly work for you to drive likes, comments and shares, but then what if you posted a piece of content that allowed multiple members of your audience to benefit from the interactivity of the post?

To explain this, let me show you a common strategy used by The Rolling Stones before their live gigs.

Before a show, they upload of series of photos to their Facebook page, each with the title of one of their songs written on it. The incentive is simple, but incredibly powerful; the song (i.e. picture) that has the most likes before the show gets played at the gig. What an incredibly powerful way to motivate your fans and audience to have their say, and to have almost immediate feedback in hearing the song that they helped to vote for.

Now don’t shrug this one off because you’re not The Rolling Stones. Think about your existing audience and forget about how to get new likes. Just post something that your audience can benefit from (maybe you prepare a number of article or video ideas that your audience will enjoy/learn from and have them vote on which one gets released).

3. Presentations

On Social Media, people rarely think outside the square of text, photos or video and you don’t have to write a big blog post to communicate your value to the world. Take a service like SlideShare for example, where you can create mini-presentations that can be embedded on blogs and websites, and even LinkedIn.

You may be thinking “Why would I post an entire presentation, when I already struggle to get a like from just one photo?”. Whilst social media is often about the ‘what’s in front of me right now’ syndrome, longer content (that once again is of value to your audience) can be a welcome break from the news-feed, not to mention helping the person on the other end much more than many pieces of Social Media content.

The interactive component of this type of media is gained simply from the speed at which the browser works through your presentation. They can make notes as they go through, save slides from your slide deck, and if you’ve designed your slideshare well, you can include calls to action at the end which are far more likely to work thanks to the amount of time that the browser has invested in you.

Just for kicks, here is this blog post in SlideShare format for you! (FYI, I haven’t posted this anywhere else, and have received 140 views over on the slideshare website)

[slideshare id=54673336&doc=slideshare-interactivemedia-151103054343-lva1-app6891]

4. ‘The Humble Tag’

This one is often overlooked for even simple photo uploads to social media, but tagging a particular person can often start the flow of people contributing and engaging with your post. Tagging a person, whether in a comment or the main post’s content, will notify them that they’ve been tagged. You can be pretty sure that this will lead them to your post and social media page, and if it’s the right kind of post, they’ll also interact.

Here’s an example from The Social Adviser Facebook page. We invented the ‘meme day’, and encouraged people to submit their own memes. As you can see, Baz Gardner has been tagged in the post.

Then, Baz commented and tagged a number of people.

This led to….

The result; a barrage of engagement. We had a total of 75 comments and 12 likes!

So don’t just tag photos… whatever you’re posting, look for an opportunity to involve those in your community who you know will get involved. The benefit of this is that the post will often develop its own momentum without needing any further prompting by you.

5. Interactive Video

Finally, my personal fave and the ‘rolls royce’ when it comes to interaction and interactivity. In fact, you may not have even heard of this one, because interactive video is very different from normal videos.

With traditional video, you are taken from the start to the finish in a linear fashion, which often is necessary. But with interactive video, the viewer can choose their own path through the video, opting to go in one direction or dismiss another, giving them a more unique video that is tailored by their own choices. It’s like the ‘choose your own adventure’ of video if you will.

Now, this is not something that you’ll be creating yourself (not that I doubt your creativity or ingenuity). It’s simply that creating an interactive video can be a daunting and time consuming task, and I encourage you to engage the services of a video producer that has experience with these videos.

Imagine you click play on a video. It’s a business promotional video, and immediately you hear the voice of the business owner. They’re talking about their passions and drivers, and mention something about when they were a kid and realised what they wanted to do. They then move onto the service they offer, but you were really interested in their story and wanted to dig deeper into that aspect of them and their business.

Interactive video lets you do this. It is one video that can potentially suit many, many different people depending on their individual tastes and motivations.

But why is it the top of my list?

The engagement factor jumps through the roof! Most viewers replay parts of or the whole video, which increases watch time and the time spent on your website/social media page. They are also more likely to share a video like this, because let’s face it… when would they have ever seen a video like this before?! Here’s an example from a wedding photographer Just For Love Photography (in the interest of full transparency, this is my partner’s business):

http://in.fm/v/VvYDNA

Think of the main videos that your website needs and weigh up the power of creating these as interactive videos versus traditional videos. This could be a real ‘conversation starter’ for you and your business.

So where to from here?

Overall, you have many options when it comes to promoting interaction with the content that you share online. The beauty of some of the ideas presented above is that there is not much of a barrier to you implementing them (in fact, you can do so the next time you post). It will start small at first, but perseverance pays off. In no time you’ll be in the middle of genuine conversations and surprised at the effect this has on the future success of your Social Media endeavours.

Use interactive media to be the business that stands out in the ocean of content marketing.

If you use any of these ideas, or have more questions about getting the best interaction with your media and posts, let me know in the comments below and I’ll get back to you!