What type of posts get the most audience interaction? Does humor win out?
I have been interested in the automotive industry ever since I was a little kid. Cars have always fascinated me with their appearance along with what they can achieve. Therefore, I spend a lot of the day scrolling through Instagram looking at content about cars. I noticed that on the DriveTribe Instagram account they mainly post questions and polls, but they also post memes and other humorous content. That got me thinking about the kind of posts that get the most interaction from their audience—maybe there’s a reason why DriveTribe mainly posts questions and polls. In a contest of questions versus memes, which type of post wins?
Before I get into my research, I want to explore why interaction is important for a business account on Instagram. According to this article on what types of social media posts get the most engagement, the purpose of engaging with your audience is to help build a relationship between you and your audience. A similar article says that an easy way to interact with your audience is to do a poll or survey. Using what these articles say, we can get an idea of which types of social media posts get lots of interactions.
To research my question, I looked at the 30 most recent Instagram posts on the DriveTribe account as of October 13, 2022, and recorded how many likes and comments each post had. After recording those numbers, I divided the posts into different categories: questions, memes, and promotions. I decided to include promotions as a category because I noticed that there were a few of them that got engagement. An independent coder also coded my data into these categories to verify their objectivity (Cohen’s Kappa = 0.804).
According to the data that I collected from the DriveTribe Instagram account, I found that posts with questions got the most comments while meme posts got the most likes. The question posts got an average of 3,307 likes and 293 comments. Meme posts got an average of 33,644 likes and 170 comments. Promotions got an average of 8,305 likes and 572 comments; however, there was one big outlier post promoting a giveaway, which skewed the average. I assume this is because followers shared this post and people who don’t follow the account interacted with that one post.
Based on the information in this table, humorous posts generate the most total interaction, but promotional content generates the most comments. If you run an automotive Instagram account and want to increase your number of likes per post, try posting memes and other humorous content. If you want to increase active engagement through comments, running a promotion or giveaway could help. The type of posts you create should depend on what kind of engagement you are trying to generate. But to answer the inquiry of questions versus memes, it looks like memes win!