This post was written by guest blogger, Charlie Antoine. See the original post here.

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Creating more engaging content should be a top priority for all business owners. Whether you’re beginning to create a social media presence, or are just stuck in a rut, there are a number of ways to increase engagement and build your community.

Start by developing a social media strategy that fits your brand voice and determining what your social media objectives are. Then, you should promote your social media pages on your website and in marketing materials to gather followers. Once you have built a community, you’re ready to start posting. So what should you post to get likes, comments, shares or even sales? The following list of ideas will help kickstart your social media campaigns!

1. Contests

Contest posts receive some of the highest engagement rates because, well, who doesn’t want to win something?! Tools like Rafflecopter and Rignite make it easy to manage social giveaways and further increase post engagement. Ideas for social contest entries could include having your followers:

• • Like your pages on all social platforms
  • Share your posts
  • Caption an ambiguous photo
  • Use hashtags to get a campaign trending.

2. Images, images, images

Photos have incredibly high engagement rates on social media. According to a recent study by HubSpot, 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging in second (27%). Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images. Due to the popularity of apps such as Facebook and Instagram, posting photos will naturally get higher engagement due to high amounts of traffic. Some ideas for photos include:

• The people behind the brand
• Happenings around the office
• Images from an event
• Product images
• Stunning landscapes.

3. Inspirational quotes

If you’re looking for likes on Instagram and Facebook, inspirational quotes are where it’s at! People LOVE to be inspired, especially if it’s a popular quote from famous leaders, authors or poets such as Vince Lombardi or Henry David Thoreau.

4. Videos

Videos are the fastest-growing type of social post. The rise of mobile video allows the medium to reach people anywhere. 87% of online marketers use video content. A number of social platforms offer different ways to create and share videos, each great depending on your social media objectives. Instagram and Twitter are good for short-form video, whereas Facebook and Youtube are used for more lengthy videos. Native videos on LinkedIn are shared 20 times more than any other type of content with users spending three times more time watching videos than viewing static content..

Posting videos offers limitless opportunities for visual content and storytelling, like how-to videos, tips and tricks, branded advertising, movie trailers and behind-the-scenes.

5. Promotions

Social media is an opportunity to broadcast sales and promotions. Distributing coupon codes exclusive to social media will help your engagement rates and boost your followers. However, using this type of post too frequently can lead to a decrease in followers or low engagement because followers tend to tune out your posts. Create a balance of engaging and relevant content with social selling techniques.

6. Post a question to spark conversation

Despite photos and video posts having a higher share rate, text posts on Facebook and Twitter have the second-highest comment rate. Asking your followers questions will spark spirited conversations as well as give you valuable consumer feedback for future marketing decisions.

7. Sharing blogs

Blogging is a great way to provide relevant content to guide consumers to take action toward a purchase. Blogs provide useful information that educates and entices your audience. Blog posts are often shared on Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn. Another great platform to get high engagement is Quora.

8. Infographics

Infographics are powerful tools for brands to communicate with their audience. Colorful visual content like infographics increase readership and provide useful data through appealing graphical representation. According to the HubSpot study mentioned earlier, infographics are liked and shared on social media 3X more than other any other type of content. Infographics have had the biggest increase in usage among B2B marketers in the last four years -- now at 65%. People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations.

9. Reposting older content

A tactic often forgotten about is resharing old content. You likely have a massive library full of great content that has gathered dust as it gets pushed further and further down your timeline. Search for your most engaging posts and photos and bring them to the forefront of people’s newsfeeds once again. You can even use the hashtag #tbt (Throwback Thursday) to join in the popular weekly trend.

Social media content block can happen to anyone. This list is sure to kickstart your social media campaigns or inspire you to come up with new and unique ways of sharing content. Do you have any ideas to share not included on this list? Let us know in the comments below. Are you looking to kickstart your content? Contact Milwaukee digital marketing agency, Accelity.