How Effective is Interactive Content on Social Media?
Customers are looking for more than just a product or service from brands. They want to connect, and social media is a great space to foster that relationship. Social media offers a wide range of ways to provide content that allows consumers to interact and engage with the brand.
If you are looking to get strong results from both owned and paid channels, you’ve come to the right place! Check out how to use interactive content to create a deeper relationship with your target audience.
Let’s set the stage first. Here are some recent stats that underscore how effective interactive content is:
- Earns 6% more engagement from customers than static content.
- Seventy-nine percent of marketers see an increase in message retention when interactivity is included as a tactic.
- Ninety-six percent of users that start a Buzzfeed quiz finish it, providing important engagement, data and information to the company.
- Seventy-one percent of consumers say that they would shop more at a retailer that offers augmented reality (AR)-assisted shopping.
- Seventy-nine percent of marketers stated that interactive content has reusable value, promoting repeat visits and multiple exposures to a brand’s message.
If you are sold on interactive content, keep reading to learn more about the types available and how you incorporate them into your next campaign.
Types of interactive content
When it comes to interactive content, there’s almost nothing you can’t do! Here are some of the most common types of engaging content that brands can choose from and post to their social pages:
Polls/Surveys – Ask your customers their opinion and get a quick snapshot of their answers. This can help the brand learn a variety of insights including which type of content followers prefer.
Quizzes – Test your followers’ knowledge with fun quizzes that give them bragging rights about how in-tune with your brand they are. Or, they can just be for fun to boost engagement and shares. If you’re online at all there’s no doubt that you’ve seen one of BuzzFeed’s quizzes. Which Disney Princess are you? Can you find your perfect career based on your breakfast order? The list goes on and on.
AR overlays – Great for retail brands. AR overlays can help customers try on clothes, pick out accessories like sunglasses and even set furniture and décor in their homes. IKEA Place is a well-known example of this type of interactive content. The app allows customers to select furniture and then use their phone camera to show what the item would look like in the home.
360° images/video – Give your customer a full view. Perfect for vacation destinations, hotels and restaurants. This allows your customer to feel immersed in a setting and entices them to visit.
Calculators – When it comes to any content that involves numbers, a calculator could be a good fit. Perfect for financial institutions and pretty much any other function where the customer can enter information and get an answer in return. Instacart launched a wonderful example with their Turkey Cooking Time Calculator, which helps people determine how long their bird needs to bake. While this was a holiday-inspired piece of content, the calculator is still available to customers as a valuable tool, collecting data and prompting customers to place an order online.
Interactive infographics – Need an easy way to portray complex data sets? Try an interactive infographic. Customers can scroll over different sections and get a pop up that details additional information.
Assessments – Use assessments to match customers with products, services and more. Assessments can provide customized product suggestions and help a brand learn what matters most to its customers. A good example is Sephora’s Skincare Finder, which walks customers through several questions and then personalizes product suggestions.
Giveaways and contests – These are a fantastic way to get your customer to engage with your brand. The best types of giveaways and contests ask the target audience to take some type of action. It could be sharing the brand’s post, participating in user-generated content (UGC), filling in a form to collect valuable user data or some other step. This allows the brand to further interact with the user either on social media, through email or SMS marketing.
Sabra Hummus knocked it out of the park with its Sabra Hummus Challenge, asking participants to submit video sharing their favorite flavor without actually saying the name of the flavor. The brand ended up with tons of UGC and the videos have 18.3M views.
What can it do for your brand?
Each type of content can do something unique for your brand. Some benefits include:
Provide value – Today’s customers want more than a sales message; they want to feel connected to brands. One way to facilitate that connection is to provide content that gives value. Interactive content can meet that need by providing both an engaging and personalized experience based on the information or action the consumer enters.
Increase sharing – When a customer is delighted by your content, it’s more likely that they will share it with their own followers. This helps spread the brand’s message to new customers. When the content is shared by a third party, consumers are more likely to trust and engage.
Prospect profiles/segmentation – Polls, quizzes, assessments and other interactive content that collects data about customers can help a brand learn more about its target audience. This can give the brand actionable data and help further segment its audience. This allows you to generate more personalized content that fosters an even deeper connection and engages the customer.
Product insights/recommendations – Brands can learn a lot from the information customers share through interactive content. A poll might reveal customers’ favorite flavors or colors of available products. Calculators can open a brand’s eyes to a needed offering or service.
Lead generation – The depreciation of third-party cookies is coming quickly. In some cases, it’s already here. That means that brands need to take lead generation seriously, so they can add buyers to their customer relationship manager (CRM). Ask for contact information including an email to complete interactive content. Customers won’t mind sharing their data with a brand that provides them with quality content.
Gain attention – Strong interactive content will help a brand stand out from competitors that are only delivering a sales message. Sometimes interactive content goes viral and helps brands gain much more attention than anticipated.
Boost SEO – When interactive content drives customers to a website, landing page or blog, or becomes a resource that the customer returns to for continued information, it can help boost SEO. It’s also more likely that a customer will share or link out to a valuable piece of content, which can also give SEO a lift.
Better targeting – Once you have information provided by your interactive content, you can better target new customers that fit the same profile, and more easily retarget your current customers.
What types of engagements matter in 2023?
Social media is all about engagement. So, what’s most important right now? Well, the good news is that any type of engagement is a positive sign. If your customer is taking time to like your post, it means that they actually read your content and felt inspired to click the thumbs up or heart. That’s a great start!
In today’s customer relationship landscape, brands should be looking to cultivate a community of active participants because that’s what customers are seeking. In fact, 91% of consumers believe in social media’s power to connect people, and 64% said they also want to connect with brands.
So, when it comes to engagements, brands should aim for positive comments, shares and UGC. These types of interactions show that the customer isn’t simply scrolling by, but they are invested in the brand and want to develop a relationship not only with the brand, but with other fans and promoters of the company.
What platforms are most important?
Right now it’s all about short-form video. This type of content is no longer a trend, it’s a full-fledged strategy that needs to be embraced. The numbers prove it with video-based platforms taking the lead when it comes to average time spent.
TikTok is ahead of the game with average time spent on the platform at 55.8 minutes. YouTube is close behind with 47.5 minutes. It’s not surprising that the two video-based platforms are garnering the most consumer attention.
The reality is that the most important platform is the one that your target audience prefers. If you have a Gen Z audience, you’ll likely find them on TikTok. However, if you are trying to reach Millennials or Gen X, Facebook might be a better option. Do your research and determine which platform best fits your audience profile.
Interactive content is a must-have strategy
When you think about it, social media is all about engaging with others. So, it makes sense that content that prompts the user to participate would be highly effective. Advertisers see strong results from including interactive content, and with so many options to choose from, there’s bound to be a few that fit your brand’s marketing initiatives. Be sure to consider your brand goals when selecting the type of content, and how/which data you want to collect from your target audience. Planning a strategy in advance that aligns with your brand’s overarching KPIs will produce the best results.
The social media marketing experts at Beyond Fifteen can help your brand determine which type of interactive content would be best for your brand, as well as narrow down ideal platforms. Call us to connect with our team and learn more!