Fantastic Fill in the Blanks on Social Media
Fantastic fill in the blanks for social media can definitely attract more traffic to your website. People love to use their imagination and share it with others online.
Do you remember Mad Libs? Those books filled with one-page stories filled with blanks that invited you to insert your own keywords? They were invented in 1953 by Leonard Stern and Roger Price, who published the first Mad Libs book themselves in 1958. It turns out that these guys were ahead of their time in recognizing the power of the ‘blank’.
Fill in the blanks can prompt people to think about activities they would like to do and places they would love to visit. For example, Disney posted, “If I could spend a day with a Disney character, I would choose _______.”
This is a great way to encourage creative responses as well as to promote engagement with your posts and tweets. The blanks are essentially ‘platforms’ for people to share their creativity.
- My favorite way to relax after a long hard day is to _______.
- _______ always makes me feel inspired.
- The best afternoon snack of all time is _______.
- My favorite board game is _______.
These types of posts often garner fun and short comments, which then encourage your audience to react and interact. Share a great photo and a good fill-in-the-blank sentence to inspire your audience to engage with you and your brand.
Fill-in-the-blank posts feel incomplete until they’re engaged with. People love filling in blanks, and the most effective fill-in-the-blank posts are the ones that let fans share their ideas.
Make fill-in-the-blank posts and tweets relevant to your fans and the space you’re working in to see the best results.
Use fill-in-the-blank posts as a two-pronged engagement tactic: interact with your online community and get to know them better for future marketing campaigns.
Use the post tactic in conjunction with a specific event, such as a holiday.
Fill in the blank contests are great as they have the potential to actually get people thinking. The contest consists of a sentence of paragraph, and your fans are asked to add their own unique perspective by, obviously, filling in the blanks.
Fill-in-the-blanks are similar to questions. They are simple and create engagement. Some samples of these are:
- My favorite social media site is _______________.
- I’ve lived in ___________cities in my life.
- I laugh every time I think about ______.
Have fun with these, but one piece of advice is to be careful that you don’t leave the blank too open ended for a potentially bad response. Be careful what you make a fill in the blank because people can turn it ugly. That is what happened when the German grocery chain posted this:
“I became an ALDI-lover when I tasted _______ for the first time.”
Tweet out a straightforward question that’s easy to answer. When questions are short and simple, it’s easy for followers to respond because they don’t need to spend a lot of time thinking about their answer or trying to fit a longer reply into 140 characters (or fewer if there is a hashtag).
Fill-in-the-blank tweets get your followers thinking and challenge to them to show their creative side. The key to making fill-in-the-blank tweets work for your company is to relate them to your followers’ interests. Then you will have success!