There is no shortage of social media “How-To” guides and articles that are focused on the importance of creating engaging social media posts. Engagement is an incredibly important topic in the social media world, and social media managers and influencers are all looking for ways to boost interactions for their posts and to grow the number of their followers. The main challenge (obviously) is finding out how to create engaging content for social media that can be put into practice. What qualities make a social media post effective and grabs the attention of its viewers? Are there ways to research and analyze engaging social media posts? And the “common wisdom” provided by all sorts of blog posts and articles currently out there really enough to help you start creating content that inspires action?   

Various guides you may read online talk generally about various approaches that you can take when it comes to creating engaging content for social media. Unfortunately, the tips and tricks that these guides offer can be vague or don’t really give you much to go on other than giving you some examples of successful posts. However, we are going to take a different approach than most other articles. We want to provide you not with general tips that many label as “best practices,” but rather want to show you a data-based and analytical methods to determining why some posts may be more engaging than others and what aspects may make them successful.  

In going through how to create engaging social media content, we want to emphasize that there are tools and methods you can use to go beyond what general tips and tricks. At the end of the day, the secret to learning how to create engaging content for social media relates to taking data-based approaches that are gained through research and analysis. 

To begin, we will go through the different parts of a post that you need to pay attention to and understand when creating your overall strategy. We will then discuss some of the main ways you can research how to optimize your posts through data-based approaches. In reality, there are a number of different analyses you can undertake such as researching ideal posting times, the best hashtags to use, and the top-performing content formats. We will then introduce an important approach, called a tagging analysis, that represents a game-changing opportunity when it comes to finding out what characteristics are correlated with engaging social media posts.

What is Engaging Content for Social Media?

Engaging content means that you are creating content that inspires action, which can come in different forms. Interactions usually come in the form of likes, comments, link clicks, and shares which can be measured and tracked individually or together as reactions/interactions. The interest in engagement and interactions on social media is related to a few primary factors. First, engagement, and especially early interactions, generally is an important ranking factor for the various ranking algorithms employed by social media networks. The more early interactions you have, the more likely it is that the algorithm will rank your content highly, thus extending your reach. 

Second, people who share your content help you extend your reach and is an indicator about how successful your overall social media strategy actually is. Whether you are an influencer or a social media manager, you want to show that people are not simply skimming over your content, but rather find it engaging enough to interact with. 

Anyone who has created social media posts is aware of the importance of engaging content that gets people not only to pay attention to it, but then to take some action as well. The difficulty at the beginning, as always, is to create content that will actually be engaging. As we always pointed out, tips to create highly engaging content are often generalized and may seem easy to follow at first, but the actual reality of implementing best practices is much harder. For this reason, it is sometimes useful to break down social media posts into different parts and work on individual aspects separately. With this in mind, it would be helpful to go through the different parts of a social media post to be aware of.  

Understanding the Anatomy of a Social Media Post

If you have profiles on one or more social media networks, you may see dozens or even hundreds of social media posts every day. There is also a good chance you have interacted with at least a few of these in some way. So what makes a good social media post that people want to interact with?    

There can be many different factors to take into account when analyzing why a social media post has high engagement rates. In reality, there are different components of a social media post which are used for a variety of goals, whether it is to rank better with an algorithm, to catch the attention of a user, or entice someone to take some sort of action. For this reason, it can be helpful to better understand what the so-called anatomy of a social media post.

In reality, the anatomy of a social media post can be broken down into the following parts: 

1. Content Format
2. CTAs
3. Content/Caption
4. Hashtags
5. Posting Times
6. Emojis
7. Visuals/Images

The standard tips to create highly engaging content are generally focused on a few or all of these different parts and how to optimize each one. However, implementing tips and best practices is clearly easier said than done since not all social media profiles are the same and often those managing profiles are focused on different markets, industries, and audiences. Moreover, a piece of advice such as “create eye-catching images” while providing a few examples may not be overly helpful when you are tasked with creating your own post for your own target audience. 

That is why data-based approaches to determining what characteristics of a post correlate with higher engagement can be an important source of guidance related to creating your own social media content. Some of these data-based approaches are relatively straightforward to undertake, while others may take a bit more time, effort, and thought. 

Below, we will go through the various data-based approaches you can take in order to create engaging social media posts. However, simply using these approaches don’t automatically make your content a success. Always keep in mind that you know your target audience best and, using your experience and knowledge of your audience, will have a good idea about what will resonate with them. In other words, use these data-based approaches as one part of your overall content strategy but also make sure you are not hiding your true, authentic voice when creating content. 

How to Create Engaging Social Media Content Utilizing Data-Based Approaches

When discussing data-based approaches to help us create engaging content for social media, we should first discuss the source of our data that helps us research factors that make content successful. To start off, we should point out that you have access to the various metrics and performance of your social media profiles, and generally, you can gain some good insights about what is working with well with your own content. However, in order to really benefit from research and data-based approaches, finding a powerful competitor analysis and benchmarking tool is a must. Not only can you get a better idea of where your profiles stand in comparison to other similar ones through a benchmarking analysis, but you also can use the public data of other profiles to better study what makes a good social media post.

In this sense, data collected from your own profiles and from that of other similar profiles in your industry and/or location are the best data points you can collect and analyze to help give you ideas about how to optimize your content. In utilizing various data-based approaches aimed at creating social media content that inspires action, it is important to emphasize that you need to analyze enough data points to make your overall analysis accurate. For this reason, being able to bring in many data points from competitors and other similar profiles can greatly improve the accuracy of the insights you gain and give you more confidence in your findings. In the case, having unlimited profile tracking is an immense benefit for those looking to conduct deep analytical inquiries and discover optimization insights.

For the types of analyses that we will mention below, it is important to always remember    the timeframe for your analysis matters, since this specifies the dates from which your data is coming from. You may want to focus on a relatively short timeframe (a specific week or month) or alternatively on an entire year. The choice in timeframes is up to you and what timeframe(s) you are interested in. Also, keep in mind that you can content the following analyses either focusing on one specific social media network or analyzing two or more networks simultaneously. Again, this is up to you and your goals and overall social media strategy. The important point is that profiles and networks that you choose to bring into your analysis as well as the timeframes you specify will then determine how many data points are ultimately analyzed.

Let’s now talk about some of the different analyses you can do in conjugation with researching how to increase engagement. We have already covered how to conduct content optimization research in general previously, but here we will provide an overview of the different options you have in terms of creating engaging content for social media.

The first approach we will mention is researching ideal posting times. This is a great way to identify when you should be posting, depending on the times your audience is most likely to engage in some way with your content. As we know, early engagement for your posts is an important ranking factor for many social media network algorithms. While posting time is just one small part that makes up the autonomy of a post, it can help you with engagement and should not be ignored. You can use a data-based approach in determining when you should post using data from your profiles as well as other similar ones you add to your analysis. You can read our studies on the best times to post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest if you are interested is learning more about setting up this type of analysis.

Hashtags are another important aspect of a post as it relates to boosting engagement. Researching hashtags helps you explore correlations between specific hashtags and the post interaction rates of posts that use them. Similarly to researching posting time, you can also study the hashtags in your industry or content niche that correspond to high engagement rates by bringing in data from your own profiles as well as that of your competitors. This can not only help you find suitable hashtags for your own posts, but also give you an idea about what topics are trending. If you are interested in leaning more about this approach, we have also written extensively about hashtag research for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter.

When it comes to analyzing different content formats and how they relate to engagement, you can also employ data-based approaches to research this. From Stories, Carousels, and Reels on Instagram to YouTube shorts, you have options in terms of how you can present and display your content on some social media networks. However, how do you know what content format is preferred by your target audience?  Luckily, there are also ways to research this using your own historical data as well as that of your competitors, which gives you another option in creating content that inspires action.

A more general point to make regarding any analysis of your social media performance revolves around understanding what your followers, and potential followers, want to see. In this sense, taking time to study and understand your target audience can also be an important part of your content strategy. You can always take a closer look and study top-performing posts in a metric table that allows you to zero-in on posts that perform well.  In this way, you can take a more granular look at many posts and see what is performing best according to specific metrics. Moreover, benchmarking yourself against the top performers in your industry or region to see where you may need to improve. 

The different analyses we discuss above show that, with the right social media tool, you can begin to find out ways to research factors that correspond to engaging social media posts. It is important to once more emphasize that unlimited profile tracking helps you put together meaningful large data sets. However, at the end of the day, what makes a good social media post outside of these factors? We only talked about optimizing a few parts that make up an anatomy of a social media post, but didn’t really address what content/captions or images may help you generate engagement. For this reason, you may be wondering what you can do to research making engaging content for those parts of a post. Don’t worry. We will now discuss another type of analysis you can do in order to better understand how to create engaging content for your social media profiles. 

Understanding Engaging Social Media Posts with a Content Tagging Analysis

A tagging analysis simply explores correlations between certain characteristics of existing posts of your choosing and a specific metric, such as engagement or post interaction rate. This allows you to then find out what qualities or characteristics of a post correlate with higher engagement rates and can give you real insight about what type of content you should be posting. 

We will now show you how to research the qualities of engaging social media posts while using a tagging analysis with a few real-world examples. In our first example, let’s look at some leading bike brands and their use of Instagram to promote their products. Ultimately, we want to find out what we should be posting by defining different characteristics of posts and then researching which ones correlate to higher post interaction rates. In our first scenario, we will test a simple hypothesis: are engagement rates higher when simply an image of a bike is posted, or rather a bike with people? We looked at a mix of bike manufactures that includes Cannondale, Canyon, Giant, Specialized, and Trek bikes. Moreover, for our first example, we will focus on posts these profiles made on Instagram in October 2024.  

Now that we have stipulated what our goal is, the social media network and profiles we are interested in, and the time period for our study, we need to create our tags. For this example, we will create tags “Bikes without people” and “Bikes with people.” Once this is done, we can go and tag the posts in our data set according to one of these two tags, as you see below.

In order to collect some data points to ultimately make an analysis, we tagged a total of 20 posts which we assigned one of the two tabs in order to keep it balanced. As seen below, our results show that “Bikes with people” images have a slightly higher post interaction rate, on average, than “Bikes without people.”

However, you might be thinking that this is a relatively small data set (which it is). As we already pointed out, larger data sets and more data points can help give you more confidence in the accuracy of your findings. When using the Fanpage Karma tagging analysis feature that we are utilizing here you can use the AI-tagging function that allows you to automatically tag posts for you, easily allowing you to add hundreds of post to your data set. As we highlight in the example, you can also apply multiple tags at once as the example shows you below while having AI. In this way, you can relatively quickly and efficiently apply many tags to a large number of posts.

This brings up another good point about categories. Keep in mind that you can choose categories about any aspect of the post that you want. For instance, you can use tags that represent the overall tone or mood of posts, the number of people in posts, posts related to different campaigns, the overall topic or theme, and more. You can also analyze different categories simultaneously.  Moreover, you can also ask AI to help you identity more categories you might want to consider, as seen here:

It may be helpful to provide another example of a tagging analysis you can perform. For our second example, we will look at a correlation between post interaction rates related to a specific topic. We often see coffee companies connect their products to a particular event or tie of the year. Does this help with engagement rates? In this case, we will analyze the Facebook profiles the following coffee companies and the content they are posting related to Halloween: Biggby Coffee, Caribou Coffee, Coffee Beanery, Starbucks, and The Human Bean. We will focus their Facebook content in October 2024. In our tagging analysis, we looked for posts in this time period that make a reference in some way to Halloween and labeled those as “Halloween.” Posts that didn’t make any reference or have some sort of thematic connection to Halloween were labeled as “No Halloween.”

Similar to the first example, we tagged 20 posts that correspond to each category tag. As we can see below, content that relate to Halloween have a higher average post interaction rate than those that don’t.

These two examples give you a good introduction into how you can set up a tagging analysis to explore the different characteristics that you want to examine more closely. One of the most prominent benefits of this type of analysis is the flexibility it gives you to access the performance of posts and pinpoint different characteristics that make posts more (or less) engaging. The ultimate aim of this article is to show you the basics of how to set up a tagging analysis so then you can explore correlations that are relevant to your needs.

As we showed above, you can explore correlations between the characteristics or features of a post that you choose, and then find out how they correspond to a specific metric. You can also look at the performance of individualized campaigns on one or more networks or compare the overall performance of those campaigns across many networks. At the end of the day, the analyses you can undertake for campaigns or posts are almost limitless. With the tagging analysis tool that we have highlighted from Fanpage Karma, you obtain deep insights about how to create engaging social media content.

Final Thoughts on How to Create Engaging Content for Social Media

Ultimately, creating engaging content for your social media profiles is clearly reliant on your own creativity and understanding of your target audience. Additionally, the approaches and methods we highlighted explore correlations, and simply studying these correlations may not always yield the results you are looking for. However, as we already saw with the different data-based approaches seen above, you can effectively use research to find out which ways you can optimize different parts of your own posts. In this sense, a tagging analysis helps you optimize the different parts of your post whether it is the content, image/visuals, CTAs, etc. 

The tagging analysis we presented above can truly take your content creation to the next level, since you can now explore correlations between different aspects of posts and specific metrics. This takes you beyond the looking at posting times, hashtags, and content formats and toward more qualitative aspects of your content. This can give you good indications of what your target audience wants to see. 

If you are looking for a tool that is designed for conducting the analyses you saw above, you are welcome to take advantage of Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial and try this data–based approach for yourself. You can then try all the analyses (and more) that we highlight in this article and find out what makes this such an advanced tool for social media analytics. Moreover, Fanpage Karma offers robust community management, publishing, and research features that are perfect for agencies and companies of all sizes.

You can also sign up for our free weekly webinar to find out how to set up the analyses that we describe above.