We have all heard that conversations drive engagement.
And the more someone is engaged with a brand the more likely they are to purchase from that brand.
But you may not have heard of the “rule of seven,” a term coined by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.
The rule states that you need to see and engage with your customers a minimum of 7 times for you to stand out in their minds, before they are ready to purchase from you.
It all comes back to conversations. They are the most powerful type of engagement.
So… How do you get people to engage with you and your brand?
First of all, you need to woo your audience. You want them to trust you, and you do that by posting relevant content that speaks to them, about them, and for them. These kinds of organic posts (like the ones I will show you today) will attract people to you.
Then ideally, you want to get your content out to more people without spending more money. By posting organically engaging content, you won’t need to spend as much on boosting or paid ads. And who doesn’t want to get their content out to more people for cheaper?
It all comes back to conversations. They are the most powerful type of engagement. So you want to be posting things that start that communication with your audience.
In this post we will cover 9 different types of organic posts you can use to instantly increase the amount of engagement on your social platforms, even if you don’t spend a penny on ads.
1) Know someone who?
This post is one of the easiest types to create. “Know someone who…,” “Somewhere there is a [type of person] who…,” “We all have that special friend who….” These are calls to action we can use in our organic posts to encourage our audience to not just stop and look, but also to reach out to someone in their lives who shares this topic with them.
You can use these posts to collect people who are proven to engage with a certain topic. As they mention their friends they become powerful social proof for your brand. You automatically have a tighter connection with that new “future customer” because they watched their friends have a conversation with you.
2) Coattails Post
This post allows you to use another brand or interest to help build your credibility. Roland Frasier did exactly that with this post featuring his wife.
Roland’s target audience is people who want to grow their wealth, so he picked a high-end hotel to “ride the coattails” of. By tagging that particular hotel in his organic post, he gained access to their audience as well as his own.
For you, think about where the people you are trying to attract “live” online? What other interests do they have? What places they may have visited? Things they may have on their bucket list or things they want to do? Roland knew the hotels where the people he wanted to attract visited and featured content from there.
Here’s a key tip: Facebook knows when people travel and where they stay. And when your content features a location your audience has been, it increases that content’s distribution in their feed. Since Facebook views that content as more relevant to the audience. it gives it a higher “affinity score.”
3) Play I-Spy with Your Audience
Yes, literally, a game.
Games are a great way to get people to respond with micro-engagements. Micro-engagements are things like likes, hearts, or short comments. There is something universal, fun, and irresistible about game content. People cannot help but smile or participate when they see a game their friends have acted on.
Mobile of New Zealand played a game of I-Spy with their audience using a 360 photo.
Not only did this game increase clicks on their content, the time engaged on the page was HUGE, causing a spike in reach with their brand’s content!
4) The Guessing Game
This is another fast, irresistible game. If done well, this type of organic post can engage your audience to help sell your product! That is exactly what happened for Mark, a franchise owner of Marco’s Pizza. He posted a game into a local Facebook group and it went bonkers!
Not only did he get a lot of micro-engagements with his brand, but the timing was genius! Friday night, right before the Super Bowl. And when people were out buying pizza, his pizza store was top of mind!
5) Create a Screen-Stopper
These are a type of video that flashes images to you in a quick sequence, almost fitting them together into a story, much like this post from Airbnb. What I love about this post is that it starts with 1 image, and as you scroll past it grabs another image.
This “screen stopper” grabs the reader’s attention and brings them back to the content.
Another version of the screen stopper is this post from Growing Play. They used this organic post to collect people into video-view audiences. These parents and preschool teachers were potential customers who would consume more content and purchase their products. Her readers watched the flashing words and grabbed a screenshot to give them an instant activity to do with their bored kids. Genius!
6) Identification Quizzes
The rule of seven states that you need to see and engage with your customers a minimum of 7 times for you to stand out in their minds.
These posts go bonkers! Buzzfeed says they are among their most popular content. What’s really cool isn’t just the fact that these posts get crazy engagement, but they are PERFECT as a vehicle for market research and as a mechanism to get a ton of engagements as fast as possible. Fulfill that “rule of 7” as fast as you can!
What do you do?
Ask your readers a series of questions to help them sort, or self-identify, themselves as interested in a topic. Sometimes you can help your audience pick the perfect product of yours for them to purchase.
You can also use these posts to collect information about the city or region your audience is in to help build up tourism, or to sell homes—or take advantage of the location/coattail post I talked about earlier.
You can also use these posts to position products to consumers for future organic posts ex: what flavor of fruit are you… you now have valuable information about your audience and you can follow up with them featuring merch about fruit (scratch-n-sniff notepads??) or cookbooks filled with fruit!
7) Watch Parties
If you have a Facebook group, this type of post is a great way to get quick engagements, and have an ongoing dialogue with your audience, without creating new content. You can post videos that other people make, and then discuss them together in your group, in real time.
(RELATED: How to Build and Manage a Private Facebook Group)
You can also use this method as a way to repost old content from your page back into your groups. As a bonus, everyone who is online and watching gets a notification to join your “party.” Below is a screenshot grabbed from a watch party that helped Ryan Levesque close a $2.5 million launch.
Conversations like the one in this watch party convert readers into fans—and ultimately buyers.
8) Host a Real-Life Treasure Hunt
Facebook has said they are filling our feed with content they believe is proof of meaningful connections. Part of the feed ranking system for meaningful connection is based on mutual relationships, time relevance, and location. It is that third element that you can totally capitalize on using a real-life treasure hunt.
Nate Lind worked to create an audience of people in his local area by hiding $500 around the town. Then he gave people clues to where it was located, and participants went on a treasure hunt. The pages associated with the treasure hunts grew at record speed, and with a highly relevant audience, Facebook saw the page as a source of “meaningful connections” in their local communities! It is genius!
9) Heartbeat Checks.
These posts are by far the easiest for anyone to use and grow engagement. They work for pages, groups, and even for people who want to grow the number of friends and the engagement of their personal profiles on Facebook (they also work in other social media platforms in addition to Facebook). We use them successfully on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and more.
What is a heartbeat check? It is a simple question that takes no real effort for your readers to answer, and it helps your reader connect quickly to you—in conversation. Questions like, “Who else is a ___?” or “When was the last time you _____?” are just a start. We have a list of heartbeat checks that work with any niche and can be used to promote any product—just click here to download them.
That wraps up 9 different types of posts you can create on your social media platforms that will instantly increase engagement. These posts get your audience to do some of the heavy lifting of growing your page for you.
