Are your social media posts getting few – or no – comments and likes? Perhaps it feels like everyone is just scrolling past.
If you want to get results from social media, you need to stand out and grab people’s attention. Otherwise, the latest funny cat video, baby photo, or snapshot of someone’s breakfast will be getting far more likes than your content.
So how exactly do you go about creating attention-grabbing social media posts? We’ve got you covered.
First, let’s take a look at some general tips that should help with pretty much anything you post on social media. Then, we’ll dig into lots of ideas for attention-grabbing types of social media posts to try.
General Tips for Attention-Grabbing Social Media Posts
1. Brand Your Social Media Posts
You want your customers and fans to instantly recognize your posts in their social media feed. Where possible, use aspects of your brand to help mark your posts out as yours. If you’re adding text to a photo, for instance, you could use your brand fonts and colors.
2. Keep Sentences and Paragraphs Short
Shorter is usually better on social media. If your social media posts are long screeds of text, they’re going to be all too easy to scroll past. Keep it snappy: don’t use more words than you need to. Break up long sentences and paragraphs, too, just as you would in your blog content.
3. Add Humor (if Appropriate for Your Brand)
Funny social media posts are often the ones that get the most attention on social media. If you want your post to go viral, humor is a great way to do that. Just make sure you’re using humor in a way that’s appropriate to your brand and your audience.
4. Include Trigger Words
Using trigger words in your social media posts can be a great way to grab attention. Trigger words are ones that tap into emotions and help your audience to know that you really get their problems and struggles. You can find a handy list of trigger words here.
5. Only Post Once or Twice Per Day
Are you trying to improve engagement by posting multiple times per day on social media? If you’re sending out tweets every hour or adding new photos to Instagram constantly, then you may struggle to get any attention because you’re sharing too much. Try posting once or twice a day instead on most social media platforms and track your results.
6. Tag Influencers in Your Niche
While you won’t want to do this with every post, tagging influencers in relevant social media posts can hugely increase how much attention you get. People scrolling through will spot the name of someone they know (bonus points if the influencer is in a photo with your post) – and the influencer may well reshare your post, hugely boosting your potential audience.
Types of Social Media Posts to Try
Are you struggling to come up with ideas about what to post? Try some of these attention-grabbing posts to engage your audience.
7. Tell Your Audience About a New Product Release
Do you have a new product or another release (such as a new software edition) coming up? Use social media to share information or even just to drop hints – you might share a teaser video, screenshots, photos, or anything that you think your audience will love. This is such a popular type of social media post that Twitter is even rolling out a “Product Drops” launch reminder feature.
Example: Disney+ Product Release
You might not have quite the number of eager fans as Disney – but telling people about upcoming product announcements can generate a lot of buzz and excitement.
8. Share a Photo of Your Company Staff
Do you have a recent photo of all (or even some) of your company employees in one place? Your customers will love the opportunity to see the people behind the product or service that they enjoy – and sharing photos is not just a great way to boost engagement, it can also help “humanize” your brand. Photos from a company retreat work really well, as they tend to be more interesting than photos taken in the office.
Example: Alloy’s Company Retreat
These lovely photos show Alloy’s employees having fun together on a company retreat. Note how Alloy mentions in the tweet what they do (“talking about how to solve fraud as experts”) – subtly reinforcing their expertise.
9. Run a Limited-Time Promotion
Promotions and special offers are sure to get attention. Whether you’re running the promotion exclusively on social media or you’re simply promoting an offer that’s on your website, you’ll want to make sure you let all your followers know about it. Make sure you include crucial details like what the offer is (e.g., “30% off sitewide”) and, if possible, how long it lasts for.
Example:
This offer is simple and direct, but has the nice touch of also including reviews to give social proof of the game’s popularity.
10. Create Quick “How-To” Guides for Your Product
Does your product have specific features that users sometimes struggle with – or perhaps that your customers don’t even realize exist? Or perhaps you have a physical product that needs a tiny bit of setting up, and you get a lot of calls to your customer helpline about this. Creating short “how-to” guides for your product can be hugely helpful to your audience – and save your support team some time too. If your guide is too long to fit in a social media post, you can simply link to it instead.
Example:
Shopify prides itself on making things easy: this tweet explains the benefits of automation and segmentation in clear language and links to a how-to. Note the lack of capital letters – part of Shopify’s laid-back brand style on Twitter.
11. Share the Best Content from Your Blog
To get more traffic to your blog, make sure you’re sharing links to your best content on social media. (Try including a short snippet or interesting summary to help get attention.) Don’t forget to make it easy for other people to share your content, too: use a share button for the social platforms your audience uses the most, so they can share your blog content to their social media with a couple of clicks.
Example:
This simple link to a comprehensive blog post, along with one of Social Media Examiner’s branded cartoon-style images, is a great way to showcase a piece of really valuable content.
12. Use Eye-Catching Images
Striking images are a fantastic way to capture attention on social media. They’re particularly important on Instagram, as it’s so image-focused, but a great image is also a brilliant way to stand out on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. The best images tend to use color and composition in striking ways.
Example:
This attention-grabbing image from Instagram is colorful, funny, and eye-catching. The little captions on the image use innocent’s house style (font and lack of capitalization) for instant brand recognition.
13. Talk About a New Feature of Your Product
Whether you have a physical or virtual product, you might be bringing out new features regularly. If you’re creating a new version or adding to the existing product, make sure your social media followers know about it. You could show a short video of the new feature, demonstrating how it works and building excitement.
Example:
Google’s fun preview of its new AR feature is a short video on Instagram, showing how the Arc de Triomphe can be virtually added to the user’s own room, using the “View in your space” feature.
14. Go Live – Regularly
Going live on social media can be a great way to get attention, as people who are scrolling through their social media feed may well stop to watch your video. If you make live videos a regular occurrence, you’ll hopefully get your audience to tune in regularly to watch you – a great way to be sure that you have their attention. You can use platforms like Facebook which let you easily stream live video, or you can simply post on social media with a link to a livestream elsewhere.
Example:
This straightforward and succinct announcement tells Nintendo fans everything they need to know: the date, time, length, and content of an upcoming livestream.
15. Share Funny Memes and Gifs
There’s no denying that the most popular social media posts tend to be ones that make people laugh. Funny memes and gifs can get a lot of shares and attention. Don’t simply reshare an old meme, though: create something specific to your company, product, or service.
Example:
This screencap from Amazon Prime’s popular series The Boys is one that fans could easily retweet or recaption themselves.
16. Ask an (Interesting) Question
Questions can be a great way to get attention on social media: when people answer your question, that helps to make your post visible to their followers. The trick is to choose the right type of question. If you simply ask “what do you like best about our product?” you might not get any answers. Choose an interesting question that’s related to what you do – but that’s also easy to answer.
Example:
This simple question from Delta is an easy one for followers to answer – and it also makes a lot of sense in the context of an airline!
17. Invite (and Promise) Interaction
You’re keen to get attention on social media – and your audience feels the same way. Despite all the constant content, social media can sometimes seem like a lonely place to be, if no one’s responding. Delight your audience by not only inviting them to interact with you but by promising that you will respond to them. A great way to do this is with a post where you offer some kind of quick feedback or response in return for every comment – or even every heart reaction.
Example:
This fun offer from Kroger resulted in lots of delightful interaction, like “Brussels Sprouts” – “No sprout about it; you’re the best!” and “Tacos” – “You’re spec-taco-ular”.
18. Share Reviews from Customers
Do you have any great reviews or testimonials from customers? On sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, these may not get as much visibility as you’d like. Don’t be afraid to reshare your best reviews and words from customers: this won’t look like bragging, but it will help boost engagement (and it can also be very rewarding for the person who left the review or testimonial).
Example:
This lovely piece of feedback highlights an aspect of Monkey World that people might not know about: the amount of wildlife around the park. It might encourage more visitors – and it could also prompt past visitors to leave their own reviews or send in photos.
19. Encourage Silliness
We’ve already mentioned how popular funny memes and gifs are on social media. Humor and silliness in general can be great ways to get attention. By encouraging users to be a little silly, you might find you get a surprisingly large response – even if, like Skittles below, you’re promising precisely nothing in return.
Example:
It’s definitely silly, but this tweet got a huge amount of interaction and a whopping 3,400+ likes.
20. Run a Competition or Giveaway
Competitions and giveaways are hugely popular on social media. Not only are they a great excuse to create an attention-grabbing post, they’re also fantastic for letting people know about your product. People who don’t win the competition may well go ahead and buy the product they were hoping to win.
Example:
Like any good giveaway, Califia Farms makes it really clear what the prizes are, how to enter, and what the terms of the competition are – with clever use of the green hearts to tie in with the mint chip theme. The gorgeous photo goes a long way toward making it catch attention, too.
21. Share User-Generated Content
Another fantastic way to get attention on social media is to invite – and share – content that’s created by your users. For instance, you might encourage people to send in a photo or video showing how they use your product. You could also share useful content such as “hacks” that people have developed for your product, unusual or funny ways of using it, or even user-created tutorials.
Example:
Fun creations, great photos, and a celebration of Pride – this LEGO post is a great way to share user-generated content alongside showcasing LEGO’s values.
Wrapping up,
There’s always going to be an element of luck involved when it comes to getting attention for your social media posts. But by following the tips above, and trying out some of the ideas we’ve looked at, you’ll soon find that you’re creating many more attention-grabbing social media posts – and seeing your leads and sales increase as a result.