Want to Make a Splash on Social Media? The Top Seven Tips for Using Quizzes to Boost Your Appeal and Reach

Do you work in content marketing? Are you a social media manager for a company? In this new year are you looking for new and creative ways to boost your reach on social media and to boost the ways your potential users find you? If you are ready to try something new, then consider using quizzes to boost your search and to make your mark on social media.  We’ve all taken one just to see what silly response we could get out if it. Gamifying your marketing strategy is not only fun and creative but it’s appealing to your users because it brings levity, competition and participation to the forefront. The best part about using quizzes as a marketing strategy is that you can test different ones and tweak them as time goes on to target a specific audience and generate leads for a sub-group of your targeted population. Read on to learn our top seven tips for using quizzes to boost your appeal and reach on social media:

Tip #1: Know Your Audience

The first step in determining whether to test quizzes on social media is to know your audience. You can determine a lot about what your target audience will accept in the social media world — and participate in — based upon what you know about their past behaviors and interactions on social. For example, if you know your target audience is young adults in their 20s and 30s, then it’s likely your audience are big social media consumers and spend a good amount of their day scrolling through social media and using their smart phones to interact with the brands they love. With this information in mind about your audience, you could guess that they also will be open to fun, interactive quizzes. You have a captive audience on social media, and if you market your quiz in an appealing way, they are likely to take it. Quizzes might not take hold with other demographics or users. It really depends on knowing your audience — and sometimes experimenting with something like a social quiz will help you determine if it’s worth it to incorporate ramification into your content marketing strategy.

Tip #2: Make Your Quiz Objective Clear

A quiz, like any strategic project, doesn’t get a lot of traction without a clear objective. What are you trying to accomplish through the user taking the quiz? Are you trying to learn about their likes or dislikes? Are you trying to bolster the image of a product that has gotten poor reviews? Are you trying to drive people to sign up for your email newsletter? Set your objective and make it as clear and targeted as possible. Your objective then will drive what kinds of specific questions you ask in the quiz. All of the steps are related and build upon one another — but the key is to start with a really strong foundation. Remember that you can have multiple objectives for a quiz, but they all need to be clear, simple and targeted.

Tip #3: Make It Fun, Fun, Fun

No one takes a boring quiz! Your quiz needs to be fun, appealing and participatory. Make the quiz interactive, ask questions that get a laugh or tap into nostalgia, and provide some kind of incentive for the user. Consumers of social media want to promote themselves and their lives at the end of the day. They want to learn something new about themselves and promote their uniqueness. That’s why quizzes that promise to determine which Star Wars or Downtown Abbey character work so well. Social media consumers want to feel that they are special and promote that to their personal communities. You can use that information to drive how you put together your quiz. The bottom line is that it needs to be fun all the way through so your user does not quit the quiz before it’s done.

Tip #4: Use Images When Possible

Words alone don’t cut it anymore. We live in a visual world, so whenever possible, incorporate images into your quiz. This can be as a simple as providing five images that serve as the answers to each question. This also makes the quiz fun and interactive. You create less work for the quiz-taker. He or she doesn’t have to expend effort to read and mull over the answers. Just choose an image and move on! It’s fun and quick, and it holds the attention of your quiz-taker.

Tip #5: Simplicity Always Rules

Ever taken a test and been perplexed? Ever stared so hard at the question that you skipped over it and maybe never came back to it? This is the sure sign of a quiz you are losing interest in because it doesn’t make sense to you. Keep that in mind when generating your own quizzes. Don’t put your quiz-taker back in school. This isn’t the bar exam! Write out your questions, and then come back to them to see if you can make them even more simple and punchier. Whenever you can, try to add a little creativity or humor. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t overthink your quiz. When it doubt, cut. Make it as simple as you can without losing your flair and your brand’s voice.

Tip #6: Hold Back on the Results

The key to an effective social quiz is that you hold back the results of the quiz until you get some kind of strategic action out of the quiz-taker. Always remember the point behind launching your interactive quiz on social media — it’s to benefit your research and reach. It’s to boost your brand’s profile and the number of potential new customers that will come to your site and visit your social media pages. With that in mind, think of the specific action you want your user to take. Do you want the user to sign up for your email list serve? Do you want your user to enter a contest, a further interactive way to gamify your marketing strategy. Do you want the user to sign up to create an account on your website? Now, we will say that this is a risky maneuver. You want your call to action to be simple and painless enough that it does not turn off the user. If you create a lot more work for the user, then he or she is likely to abandon the quiz. So make the action doable. Think about what would annoy you as a consumer and avoid that call to action. If your overall goal is simply promotion with your quiz, then it would be Okay to leave out the call to action and just let the user get the quiz results. If you go that route, try to incorporate your brand’s messaging somewhere in the results. This could be as simple as including your company’s logo in the results. Think of creative ways to get your messaging and visuals in front of the user to remind him or her who the sponsor of the quiz is. It’s subtle marketing like this that builds a message and story in the user’s mind — and you want that story and their experience both to be positive!

Tip #7: Analyze Results

The benefit of using quizzes on social media is that they can be tied directly back to your website via SEO, or search engine optimization, coding. So you actually can work with a quiz company that will generate the quiz and the coding, so you can determine which quizzes are performing the best among your target audience. It’s also important to point out that both your website and your social media accounts will benefit from the quizzes because the quizzes will be pushing traffic to both platforms. It’s easy promotion for you, too. When a user takes the quiz and then chooses to post the results on his or her social media account, such as Facebook or Twitter, then your company or brand will be visible to that person’s personal audience. The friends of that person may choose to click on the link and take your quiz, too. This is something that can be tracked easily to see how successful it was in the social media sphere. We work with our clients to write fun quizzes that will be interesting to their target audiences — and we provide all of the SEO coding and the social media strategy to help ensure your gamification campaign is as successful as it can be.

BONUS TIP:

Every quiz has the potential to sound too sales-like. Leave out all sales pitches from your quizzes. This can come later in different content marketing — such as email blasts or social media posts. You want to keep in mind the voicing of your quiz at all times. It can’t sound like you are trying to get something out of your quiz-taker. It has to sound natural and fun. Before you submit your questions, read through them and analyze them for sales language. If anything sounds like a marketing campaign, you’ve got to take it out or reword your question. This is really where a quiz-writing company can really help you take your quiz to the next level. From helping you define your objective to actually writing the quiz, a company with experience in building interactive social media quizzes can really help you articulate your voice and appeal to your target audience. It’s something to keep in mind as you consider the ways you might diversify your content marketing strategy with a quiz campaign.

Final Words on Social Quizzes

Finally, our best advice to you after reading our guide of the top seven tips for using quizzes to promote your brand is to just try it. The best attribute of social media marketing is that it is conducive to experimenting and trying new things. Sometimes you just have to jump in and look back later. Because social media constantly is changing and you are constantly vying for the attention of your audience, it’s worth it to experiment for a moment in time. If one quiz doesn’t perform well, another could. You can test different times of day and different days for reaching your optimal audience with your quizzes. You can start at a baseline and move from there — adjusting as you go. Plus, in the process of trying out social media quizzes, you’ll discover a lot about your users and their preferences for and toleration of ramification. It’s always a good idea to keep track of your quizzes and how they performed in a consolidated spreadsheet. Analyze the data and them move from there. Good luck and have fun in the process!