5 Social Media Marketing Content Ideas to Boost Your Audience Engagement

Are your social media content getting very little to no engagements?

You’re not alone.

Social media is overflowing with content from other brands and users that can easily draw your audiences’ attention away from your content. 

If you don’t step up your content marketing game, your followers can easily scroll past your posts, and you lose tons of engagement opportunities.   

The solution? Learn reliable tactics to produce creative, catchy posts and write content that people will read and share.   

Keep your social media content fresh and increase audience engagement with these five tips. 

1. Create a content series

Make your social feed come off as more of an exciting and engaging set of events for audiences instead of a grocery list of random posts. 

Create a social media content series to help you post or share content regularly. It helps keep your content flowing, allowing you to constantly interact with and engage your audiences. 

Posting relevant content consistently can also help build anticipation from your audience, so they look forward to seeing specific content from your brand. 

For example, you can create daily inspirational and helpful posts or share weekly roundups of the most liked User-Generated Content (UGC) shared by your followers. 

Leverage Facebook in-platform features and IG tools best for marketing to implement your content series seamlessly.

For instance, Vista Social lets you plan, create, and schedule your post for auto-publishing on your social media profiles.

Schedule your content to publish based on dates and times that will likely drive the most engagement. 

You can also find and share curated content without leaving the platform, making it quick and easy to produce content for your series. 

Also, Vista Social’s listening tools let you stay on top of conversations around your brand and relevant topics within your network via sophisticated filtering and timely alerts. You can leverage the insights to help inform your content series. 

A regular posting schedule shows your audiences what to expect while providing relevant, engaging content. 

2. Hold social media takeovers

When formulating your content development approach, keep social media takeovers in mind.  

Social media takeovers are excellent ways to spice up your content—by having someone else (usually an influencer) take over your social feed for a few hours or days. 

A takeover is also an engaging way to get more eyeballs on your content and brand while injecting a new voice into your social feed.

Plus, influencers have a massive following that they can bring over when they take over your account, increasing your brand’s visibility and engagement opportunities. 

Besides influencers, consider having industry experts, business partners, and even other brands take over your Instagram account for a day. 

Choose influencers and other takeover candidates with audiences relevant to your brand to increase your exposure to potential customers.   

Food Republic’s Instagram takeover by chef and cookbook author Gaby Dalkin is a classic example. 

Handing off your account to influencers in your niche for a few hours is an excellent way to freshen up your content, keeping it exciting and engaging.

3. Host an Ask Me Anything (AMA) series

One of the best ways to interact with and engage your followers is to answer some of their burning questions. You can also address what they’re curious about your brand, products, services, etc.  

An excellent approach is to run an Ask Me Anything (AMA) content series to educate, entertain, interact with, and engage your social media audience. 

Essentially, AMAs are Q&A sessions that allow you to share your knowledge, expertise, experiences, and insights with social media audiences in more interesting and fun ways.

The AMA from Ruggable below is a classic example of answering FAQs using Instagram Stories.

For instance, use the Questions sticker on Instagram Stories to encourage IG users to ask you questions.

You can also post compelling, thought-provoking, or entertaining questions that your audiences can’t help but answer, increasing interactions with your brand for higher engagement.  

Hosting AMAs or Q&As help you:

• Show a more personal side, humanizing your brand and helping you connect with your social media audience better
• Raise brand awareness without coming off as too salesy or pushy
• Learn more about your audiences’ interests, concerns, preferences, and other relevant information you can leverage for your social media marketing effort 

If you use top-tier user feedback software, you can gain relevant information and insights from the tool to help inform your AMA series. 

For example, you can use collected feedback on a specific feature on your app and weave that into your AMA sessions.    

4. Run contests or giveaways

Who doesn’t love getting free stuff? 

Certainly not the majority of social media users. 

Capitalize on this by weaving in the occasional giveaway and contest into your social media content and marketing strategies. 

Run compelling social media contests to entice your audience into participating and, in turn, drive engagement for your brand.  

When running your contest or giveaway, ensure you have the following:

• Terms and conditions. Cover yourself legally and ensure your contest looks legitimate to your prospects by including the terms and conditions. 

It also helps eliminate confusion—which can frustrate your audiences and even ruin their experience with your brand. 

• Point of contact. Include an email address or contact details on your terms and conditions page. It lets participants know how to and who they can get in touch with for their concerns and questions about the contest.  
• Include hashtags. Use branded or relevant hashtags to get more eyeballs on your contest and, in turn, your brand. Hashtags can also help you keep track of giveaway participants for free. 

Similar to how you could learn the latest Search Engine Optimization or SEO trends for B2B to boost your web page’s search visibility and ranking, leverage hashtags to make your contest searchable and highly visible to audiences. 

While you don’t have to run contests and giveaways every week, you can plan these and other related content weeks or months ahead. 

Use reliable digital marketing software such as a task management app with social media content calendar features. 

It can help you plan, organize, and prioritize your contests and giveaways to help you drive meaningful engagement and get your expected results. 

5. Publish bite sized how to and tutorial videos

Blog posts and articles are great for sharing step-by-step tutorials, especially for broad and technical topics.

However, social media audiences often don’t have the time, attention span, or patience to consume long blocks of texts. 

The solution? Create bite-sized, easy-to-digest how-to and tutorial videos for social media. 

For example, Buzzfeed produces delectable recipes broken down into short, actionable steps. 

The videos are often short and to the point yet comprehensive, making the content easy for social media audiences to follow and consume. 

Focus on tutorial video topics or ideas that you can explain in less than a minute. Include concise captions to explain each step. 

You can also use editing tricks and tools through user-friendly apps and your existing devices. For instance, you can speed up videos using an iPhone to help keep your videos short.

Take your social media content to the next level

Content alone can’t skyrocket your engagement. 

However, strategically creating and using various content types across social media channels can give you greater odds of driving higher engagement.  

Use the tips in this guide to breathe new life into your social media marketing efforts and provide content your audiences can’t help but comment on, subscribe to, share, and like.