Social Media Engagement Examples And Winning Lessons

Getting your audience to engage on social media can be difficult, even for brands that already have a strong presence. The real question is: Is social media becoming an increasingly important channel for your brand’s visibility, customer education, or thought leadership?

If the answer is yes, then understanding what drives engagement and why certain formats outperform others becomes essential.

For brands treating social as a strategic communication channel, it’s no longer about posting more; it’s about posting intentionally.

In this article, I’ll provide practical examples of engagement-driving content you can use to refine your strategy, spark meaningful interactions, and attract new audiences who already care about your space.

Interactive content, like polls and voting stories, plays a key role in boosting social media engagement, especially for brands using social to collect insights, validate ideas, or keep a pulse on their audience’s preferences.

If social media is becoming one of your brand’s primary communication channels, interactive formats are invaluable: they encourage participation without friction while delivering qualitative data you can act on.

Engaging content does more than increase visibility; it also helps brands understand their audience better, reinforce strategic messaging, and guide users toward deeper content or product experiences.

Polls & open questions

Polls and open questions drive social media engagement by sparking curiosity and inviting users to participate with minimal effort. For brands with an established audience, they’re also a smart way to gather quick sentiment on strategic decisions, content preferences, or market trends.

To promote the Socialinsider social media benchmarks report and our insights, we created a LinkedIn poll.

In this example, we asked our audience to guess the most shared content type on the platform and teased the answer in the comments.

To reinforce our findings, we shared a screenshot from the report in the comments later.

By posting this directly on LinkedIn, we leveraged the platform’s own engagement trends to highlight our data in action. This is a clear example of using engagement formats to tell a larger story about your research or expertise.

While the post didn’t get many reactions or shares, the 142 poll votes show strong engagement, proving that the question resonated with the audience. This highlights how effective polls are in driving participation, and for prompting your audience to reflect on industry insights alongside your brand.

Voting Stories/This or That Story

Voting Stories are highly engaging because they encourage quick, fun interaction on social media. But beyond entertainment, they’re a strategic way for established brands to test audience preferences, validate creative directions, or drive traffic to educational resources.

Canva, for example, has a bunch of examples of engaging content for social media, like using quizzes in Instagram Stories about design topics like fonts and colors. This not only encourages voting but also moves users from social media to their product website—a seamless micro-conversion.

By linking to their blog at the end of the quiz, Canva provides a natural next step for users who want to dig deeper.

For brands using social as a discovery and education touchpoint, this is a strong example of turning lightweight Instagram engagement into deeper content consumption.

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User-generated content (UGC) can be a powerful lever for brands that already have an established audience. It reinforces credibility, surfaces real-world use cases, and makes your community feel involved in your brand’s narrative.

UGC adds authenticity to your posts and builds trust, especially important when your audience looks to social media for proof of value or real customer experiences. When followers contribute content, they become active participants in your brand’s story, strengthening loyalty and long-term engagement.

Challenges

Challenges are great examples of engaging social media posts. They boost engagement (especially when it comes to user-generated content), encourage creativity, and get people involved by offering a fun, rewarding experience.

With the #TravelGenius TikTok campaign, Booking.com turned travel vlogs into an exciting competition, generating incredible engagement on social media.

By selecting nominees for the best travel video and offering a cash prize, they motivated users to share their real travel experiences. This is a great example of how to engage social media audiences. Not only did this campaign generate tons of UGC but also positioned Booking.com as a key part of inspiring travel content, boosting brand visibility and organic reach.

The campaign example was a big success, with over 16K engagement, 175 shares, and 98 saves. With more than 1.7M views, it reached a large audience on social media, proving the power of the challenges of generating brand awareness.

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As of writing, the hashtag has been used in over 1,000 posts, proving that the campaign encouraged substantial user participation.

Testimonials

Testimonials make for highly engaging posts for social media because they provide authentic, relatable experiences from real people, which help build trust and influence potential customers. They showcase how your product or service delivers tangible benefits, making it easier for others to connect with your brand.

The Salesforce post is a strong example of that. OpenTable puts testimonials on social media to highlight how Agentforce boosts productivity and service efficiency. Multiple reviews reinforce the message by showing real user experiences, which adds credibility and demonstrates the positive impact of the service.

Making engaging social media posts such as this one part of your strategy builds trust and encourages potential customers to see the value in using your product.

Contests and giveaways are a way to engage your audience on social media by offering them something exciting in exchange for their participation.

This type of content usually encourages entries through tagging friends, sharing posts, completing fun tasks, or all the abovementioned. These posts help boost social media interactions, build your community, grow your followers base, and drive traffic to your pages—so let’s get into that.

Trivia contests

Trivia contests offer a fun and engaging way to get your audience actively involved on social media. They engage your audience to test their knowledge while providing an easy opportunity to interact with your brand.

When aligned with current trends or industry-related topics, they not only spark curiosity but also encourage more discussions and increase participation. This type of content helps boost engagement, build anticipation, and create a stronger connection with your audience.

SEMrush’s trivia contest is among humorous and most well-thought-out examples of engaging posts; it’s a clever way to attract marketers by focusing on the biggest trends from 2024. Not only does the contest drive excitement, but it also promotes SEMrush’s free course.

It focuses on 2024’s top marketing trends, memes, and viral moments on social media, perfect for marketers who want to stay updated and have some fun.

By connecting the contest to the course, SEMrush keeps their audience engaged and offers a valuable resource that ties back to their brand’s expertise.

Caption this giveaway

“Caption this” giveaways are a fun and easy way to engage your audience on social media. It taps into their creativity and adds a playful element to your brand, encouraging followers to join in with a simple task. This type of content sparks interaction and can be a great way to have some fun with your community.

To make the most of this type of social media content, pair it with a striking image or video that will instantly catch people’s attention.

The giveaway from EGYM Global is a great example of a simple yet effective social media content strategy. By challenging followers to come up with a creative caption, the contest makes participation fun and easy while encouraging playful interaction. The clear prize incentive and straightforward entry rules help maximize engagement and keep the audience involved.

Make sure your instructions are clear, and include a call to action, like offering a prize for the funniest or most clever caption. This will not only boost engagement but also encourage people to share the post, helping you reach a wider audience.

Behind-the-scenes content gives your audience a look into the processes, values, and people behind your brand, something especially important if you’re using social media to build transparency, employer brand visibility, or expertise positioning.

Such posts humanize your brand and provide context for the work that goes into your products, events, or initiatives. This sparks curiosity and strengthens long-term community loyalty by giving followers a reason to feel connected beyond the final polished output.

How it’s made or throwback content

Throwback content drives engagement by tapping into nostalgia while highlighting your brand’s evolution and the effort behind key milestones.

For brands growing rapidly or expanding into new markets, these posts can reinforce your narrative and help the audience understand how you’ve arrived where you are today.

For example, Monday.com is engaging customers on social media by sharing the energy and teamwork behind their El Cantoral in Mexico with a backstage carousel and a long-read about their event, they show in detail how it came together.

By drawing attention to the team’s behind-the-scenes work, they emphasize their commitment to high-quality experiences and give their audience more context about the strategy and effort driving brand moments.

Educational content is especially valuable for brands using social media as a thought-leadership or customer education channel. It helps your audience solve problems, learn faster, and trust your expertise, all of which drive higher, more meaningful engagement.

This type of content is often highly shareable because it provides immediate value, making it an excellent way to keep your brand top-of-mind for audiences that rely on you for guidance or industry knowledge.

Myth-busting

Myth-busting content is engaging on social media because it challenges common misconceptions, sparks curiosity and (sometimes heated) discussions, and encourages people to learn more. It also helps the brand build authority by offering clear and data-proven insights.

Microsoft talks about AI in a quick TikTok format but also mentions that there’s a whole blog on AI myth-debunking, so they use social media to drive extra traffic to their blog, where people can dive deeper into the topic, while also attracting new TikTok users at the same time.

This strategy allows them to reach a broader audience by driving engagement on social media and promoting more in-depth interaction with their blog content.

Now, this TikTok got more than 102K views, 242 saves, and an engagement rate by views of 2.20%, indicating that people found the content valuable enough to share or keep.

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Quick tips

Quick tips are so effective because they offer practical, bite-sized advice that people can immediately put to use. This kind of content is perfect for busy audiences looking for easy solutions to common challenges.

One of the most successful social media engagement examples on quick tips comes from Expedia, who invited a travel blogger to share her top tips for navigating Japan’s public transit system.

By using popular hashtags like #TravelTips and #JapanTravel, this TikTok reaches a broader audience of travelers seeking advice, while working with “relevant” bloggers allows to blend audiences and expand social media reach.

The post delivers practical insights and low-key promotes Expedia, creating engaging and organically shareable content.

This post performed exceptionally well: over 2M views, 533 comments, 1,414 shares, almost 75k saves, and an engagement rate by views of 3.84%, showing that the content resonated strongly with viewers. The engagement rate by followers is also great—5.65%, meaning a solid level of interaction from existing followers.

Overall, this quick tips example did a fantastic job of reaching and engaging a large audience.

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Storytelling helps established brands reinforce their identity, values, and trajectory. For audiences already familiar with your brand, stories give depth; they reveal the “why” behind decisions, initiatives, or product evolution.

This approach builds emotional resonance, sparks conversation, and strengthens differentiation in a competitive landscape.

Company’s development history/Internal stories

Company development history and internal stories are powerful because they humanize your brand and show the effort behind its success.

Sharing milestones and team accomplishments on social media fosters a sense of transparency and pride for what you’ve been through and how you are doing now.

Grammarly reflects on a year of growth, celebrating their latest AI innovations and the overall contributions of their team, a great example of storytelling. The post gives people a peek into their journey, promotes the latest updates, but most importantly, highlights those who make it all happen.

By sharing internal moments, they strengthen the connection with the followers and make the brand feel more personable.

Milestone celebrations

Milestone celebrations work great for social media engagement. They often grab attention because they speak of progress and bring people together to share in the excitement. Be that a big achievement or a little but important new chapter, these moments evoke a sense of achievement, showcase progress, and invite the audience to share it on social media.

Atlassian took this approach by sharing the opening of its new office in Poland, emphasizing its growth in Europe and deeper ties to the local tech scene.

The post not only showed the thoughtfully designed space but also reinforced their #TeamAnywhere philosophy, balancing workplace flexibility with the value of in-person collaboration. This encouraged engagement from employees, partners, and the wider tech community.

To find examples of engaging social media posts and discover what works best, it’s important not only to track how your own social media posts are performing in terms of engagement but also to analyze your competitors.

By studying the types of content they post and how their audience interacts, you can gather fresh ideas to enhance your own social media strategy.

For example, some of Booking.com’s competitors, such as Airbnb or Expedia, could use this technique to get inspiration from the brand.

Using Socialinsider, you can dive into competitors’ performance data, uncovering the types of posts that generate the most interaction. This allows you to adapt and add new, effective content strategies to your approach, increasing social media engagement and boosting visibility for your brand.

When tracking metrics like likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement, you can fine-tune your content to match what your target audience really likes. These social media insights help optimize your content strategy—so let’s see how it works.

Steps to identify top-performing posts

Add profiles to Socialinsider

Connect your competitor’s social media accounts to gather engagement data.

Navigate to the Posts section

Access performance metrics to see which content is driving the most interactions.

Analyze top-engaging posts by channel

Identify patterns in content formats, messaging, and visuals that spark the most engagement. This is how you know what’s working and what’s not.

But it doesn’t stop there. Socialinsider also gives you insight into the best-performing content pillars for social media, which are the themes or types of content that consistently drive engagement.

This is an essential feature for optimizing your strategic approach. By analyzing these engagement examples, you can uncover key patterns that show what content truly resonates with your followers and how to increase participation across your posts.

We help you spot these patterns in what gets the most interaction, giving you the tools to adjust and improve your content for even better results.

Final thoughts

When it comes to boosting social media engagement, the key is understanding what resonates with your specific audience, especially if social media is becoming a core communication or branding channel for your organization.

By analyzing top-performing posts across your competitors and industry, you can identify patterns in formats, messaging, and visual presentation that consistently drive interaction.

This helps you prioritize the types of content that support your broader strategic goals, not just isolated metrics.

The most sustainable way to maintain high engagement is to consistently create content that offers value, sparks conversation, and reinforces the narrative you want your brand to own.

As your audience evolves, so should your social media content strategy, and Socialinsider makes it easier to identify those shifts and act on what matters. Find out for yourself by starting a FREE 14-day trial.