How to ensure your next Medium post is more engaging than your last

I know how hard it is to engage an audience. First you have to prove that you have something to offer. The secret to making great content? BE GENEROUS.

This post offers three things to help you make better content:

1. An engagement scale that explains the good/better/best ways to engage people
2. A content score card that helps you ensure your content is set up for success
3. Additional tips from other Medium users

1. THE ENGAGEMENT SCALE

What makes people engage? People engage when you make them FEEL something. The more they feel, the better. For your convenience, I came up with an engagement scale to help visualize how engagement works and can increase.

Here’s the scenario: you’ve written a blog post about music and you want to make sure it’s engaging. You’ve read that blog posts with photos engage 9x more than those without, so you think about adding an image to entice your audience. Here’s some examples of images that might engage a person interested in music, accompanied by assigned engagement points.

If you need to remember one thing, it’s that your audience is always asking, “What’s in it for me?”. If you’re funny, cool, or helpful, that’s a way to entice and provide value to your reader. But if you can offer them with a chance to participate, to become a co-creator, that’s when you can really engage. Because now they share the validation with you when the views and recommends and shares go up.

But remember, not every invitation to participate is generous.

2. THE CONTENT SCORE CARD

Our goal is to create generous content. But first we have to stop creating needy content. PLEASE VALIDATE ME isn’t a good way to engage. HERE, LET ME VALIDATE YOU is probably the very best way to engage. And LET’S VALIDATE EACH OTHER is the real win-win for you and your audience.

Example 1: Needy Content with Low Engagement

Sadly, there’s a lot of examples of awful, needy content from brands. For a growing list of brands asking their audience to “tell us your story”, take a peek at this dedicated tumblr:

Its time to stop treating your audience like a puppet. Nobody wants to tell your story. Unless you pay them (see example 2).

Example 2: Needy Content with High Engagement

Offering a reward will certainly get more people to engage with your needy content. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than if you offer nothing in return.

My colleague, Brittany Lake, shared this example with me recently of a better than average brand-run UGC contest by Travelocity. They asked people to tweet their dream vacation with #IWannaGo, and then several lucky winners actually won the trips.

Example 3: Generous Content with Low Engagement

In the advertising world, this is our favorite kind of content. Pretty much every TV spot or digital video that’s ever won a Cannes Lion award falls into this category. Why? It’s great, emotional content that makes the viewer feel something. But it’s low engagement because its simply about consuming the video. There’s not action to take and no way to become part of the story.

Here’s two solid examples. They give me the feels every time.

Example 4: Generous Content with High Engagement

Now comes the moment you’ve been waiting for. Content that makes you feel something AND invites you to participate. My favorite examples are the promotions done to activate Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2.

For the first Pitch Perfect film, the movie studio partnered with YouTube creator Mike Tompkins to make a co-created music video. He invited his millions of subscribers to participate, adding their own video recordings to the project. The final edit included hundreds of clips from these fans, spliced together with Mike Tompkins and the professional actors in the Pitch Perfect cast.

For the second film, the movie studio partnered with Jessie J and Smule to create an app experience that allowed fans to sing a duet with Jessie J.

Why are these activations so successful? They don’t just talk at the audience or treat them like consumers. Instead they offer a way into the experience. And they give each participant a chance to go from giver to recipient, getting validation each time their own video gets viewed and shared.

3. TIPS FROM OTHER MEDIUM USERS

If you made it this far, hopefully more than a few times you thought of something to add. Do you disagree with anything in here? Did you do some fact checking and want to point out a misstake or typo? Do you have better examples? I hope so.

And more importantly, I imagine you have your own insights to contribute. What parts of your most engaging posts are repeatable? What tips and tricks do you use to ensure high readership and sharing?

(I’ll update this section to include your comments as they come. Thank you for contributing!)