10 Social Content Formats to Drive More Engagement

Attracting engagement is one of the biggest worries for anyone creating social media content.

Will people like it? Will they like, comment, and share it?

These questions ring in your head before publishing posts.

While there’s no guarantee that any content will drive massive engagement, some content formats have a higher chance of achieving it.

In this guide, I’ve compiled 10 social content formats to drive more engagement on your posts.

Social content formats to drive engagement

1. Polls

Polls contain a question and multiple options. However, the options are opinions or preferences rather than one option being correct.

Since people hold their opinions dear, they like to give them in polls.

A poll is a great tool for collecting feedback about your operations and products. 

Apart from engaging your audience, polls also get them involved in your decision-making. 

For example, you can ask your audience:

• To pick their favorite product
• To pick a product they want you to give away
• For their biggest challenge in performing a task
• For the product tutorial they want
• For the most common task they perform with your product

To create these polls, use the native tools on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter).

For example, here’s a LinkedIn poll from the National Wildlife Federation:

If you want even more poll options, use an external tool like Uplup.

2. Giveaways and contests

Because it’s part of human wiring to compete for and win things, giveaways will always appeal to your audience.

With giveaways, you can do 3 things: engage your audience, build a positive brand image, and give fantastic prizes to your audience.

Luckily, you can run many types of giveaways to boost engagement, including:

• Like/comment to enter
• Tag a friend
• Hashtag
• Trivia
• Caption

However, it’s easy to run a giveaway that delivers little or no benefit to your business.

To run successful giveaways:

• Set a giveaway goal
• Use the right giveaway prize (should be your product)
• Use the right social media contest tools
• Define entry requirements
• Contact and announce the winners at the end of the giveaways

Laneige collaborated with Sol de Janeiro for a giveaway of their products.

With almost 40K likes and 8K comments, this is massive engagement that will help the brands reach hundreds of thousands of people.

Giveaways are a cost-effective way to engage your audience and achieve other marketing goals.

3. Lead magnet posts

If you’ve ever seen a post where the creator tells you to comment “PDF” to get a guide, you’ve seen a lead magnet post.

If you comment any of the specified words, you’ll receive a message with the next steps to take. 

These steps can include visiting a page and entering your email address to collect the free resource. 

Lead magnet posts help you acquire leads through a free resource.

To create an engaging lead magnet post:

• Create your free resource (ebook, video, etc.)
• Explain why you’re an authority on a topic
• Use a good DM automation tool like Vista Social

Here’s a LinkedIn post where Josh Lowman promises to send an ebook to people who comment the word “Claude.”

This post outperformed most of his posts in terms of engagement.

4. UGC

User-generated content (UGC) is a form of social proof from your customers. In this content, customers show how they use your product and the benefits they get.

Because of the social proof, this type of content draws other customers and prospects into your content.

However, customers don’t just wake up and decide they want to create UGC for your brand. You have to encourage it.

Some ways to encourage UGC creation include:

• Specifying a branded hashtag for UGC 
• Picking the best entries to repost on your account
• Crediting the customer

BMW regularly features UGC from its customers on Instagram.

With various types of UGC, it’s easier to engage your audience while promoting your products.

5. Quizzes

Like polls, quizzes also contain a question and options. But for quizzes, only one of the options is correct.

This works in engaging your audience because people like to show off their knowledge.

Quizzes are a great way to educate, test the knowledge, and identify knowledge gaps in your audience.

The audience insights you get from quizzes help shape your product and marketing decisions.

Some common questions to get the best insights are:

• True or false?
• What do users love most about this product?
• What is our best-selling product?
• Which problem does this product solve?

They can answer these questions in the comments or visit an external page.

6. Surveys

Your audience often has opinions about the tasks they want to perform, what they need in a tool, and how your product has helped them perform tasks.

Surveys, with targeted questions, help you collect these opinions and insights about your products and operations.

You can create surveys to improve aspects of your business like:

• Product development research
• Product satisfaction
• Customer service
• Customer loyalty
• New product ideas

That said, most social media platforms don’t offer survey tools. You have to use an external tool to create these surveys.

You can create surveys in tools like Google Forms, Typeform, and SurveyMonkey and share the link in your social media post.

For Instagram and TikTok, where you can’t add links to individual posts, you can embed your survey in a link in bio tool like Lnk.Bio and direct your audience to it.

Here’s a survey by the city of Maple Ridge to get feedback about city services:

The survey was embedded in the link in bio page to collect responses.

Through these delivery methods, you can engage your audience and get a lot of feedback.

7. Trend posts

Creating social media posts about trends is a way to capitalize on topics that have already generated a lot of engagement.

These topics will likely generate engagement for your brand.

To create a trend post:

• Look for trends relevant to your business and audience
• Connect the trend to your business or product
• Create trend posts before the trend fizzles out

With trend posts, you can align your brand with a viral topic.

8. Behind the scenes

When people love your product, they become curious about what goes on behind the scenes to create this product.

Creating behind-the-scenes content gives customers and prospects a glimpse into how your business works and can build affinity with your audience. 

Common types of behind-the-scenes content include:

• Manufacturing process
• Employee experience
• Interesting facts

Before creating behind-the-scenes content, identify aspects of your business that will interest your audience and put your business in a positive light.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video of a Super Bowl ad from The Hollywood Reporter:

In this video, actors Patrick J. Adams and Gabriel Macht talk about the ad and the popular TV series, Suits.

9. Questions

Whenever you see a question, you answer it in your mind. And if the question is interesting enough, you write the answer in the comments.

By asking thought-provoking questions, you can increase comments on your social media posts and encourage algorithms to push your content to more people.

You can ask questions about:

• Your products
• Product features
• Audience’s pain points
• Performing a task

When forming questions, ensure they’re questions your audience can answer on the spot.

10. Challenges

Challenges are fun because they give people a chance to prove their skills.

By creating challenges around your product, you can get your audience more involved in your product and brand activities.

For example, you can create a challenge to see who can perform a task best with your product. Or use a content format like duet on TikTok.

When creating a challenge, you can create one from scratch or modify a trending challenge for your brand.

Tips to increase engagement

Set engagement goals

Engagement means different things to different brands. And even for the same brand, many activities can count as engagement.

If you plan to increase social media engagement, you have to define your engagement goals by specifying metrics that indicate success.

These metrics can be the number of likes, comments, and shares.

With your goals, you can easily determine the success of your posts.

Do competitor analysis

You can learn a few things from your competitors if you study their social media strategy.

Go through their profiles and track their successful engagement methods.

Apart from competitors, study complementary brands and any other brands you admire to find engagement ideas.

Engage with other industry accounts 

Before people can engage with your brand, they need to see your content. Engaging with other industry accounts will expose your brand to your ideal audience.

And in some cases, the brands you engage with can also reciprocate the engagement.

Conclusion

Boosting engagement on your social media account will encourage algorithms to push your content to a wider audience.

This gives your content more opportunities to achieve your marketing goals.

Try these social media content formats to improve your engagement.

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