How is your brand's social media engagement rate looking? Not so great? Let's fix that. Driving engagement on social media means that your business will have to keep up with current content trends to stay ahead of the curve. Here are five proven ideas for your posts that will help generate more shares, likes, follows, and ultimately, leads for your business.

1. Create and market lead magnets

Offering something valuable for free is one of the best ways to establish your brand's authority, drive engagement, and earn followers and email subscribers.

Create a digital download for your target audience that will help turn your followers into fans. Lead magnets don't have to be complicated; Choose a topic related to your niche or industry and try using one of these ideas as a base:

• Cheat sheets or blueprints
• Free trials
• Printable planning and organization tools
• eBooks
• Email courses
• Guides and resource lists

2. Hold a contest

On average, contests can help grow your social media following by around 34%. Offer a chance to win a prize in exchange for shares and likes. Boost your contest's visibility even further by giving contestants extra entries for tagging their friends in the comments.

Contests help create brand awareness through the extra engagement they generate. Be sure that the prize you offer is something related to your business so that contest entrants are more likely to resonate with your message and continue to follow your brand.

3. Use creative quizzes

Interactive content drives engagement. People love to share their opinions. As a marketer, you already know both of these things. So, why aren't you using quizzes in your marketing strategy?

Quizzes are simple to create, they keep your audience actively engaged for the duration of the quiz, and they are highly shareable. For example, try interesting or niche topics like this chakra test does to increase engagement and get your audience interested in a product related to the topic.

Quizzes can also provide your business with valuable data and insights about your following. Come up with an eye-catching title for your quiz before posting it, because 80% of readers will decide whether or not to click on a piece of content based on the title alone.

4. Hold a webinar

Video is king right now in the marketing world and you know it. Live, interactive video that gives you an opportunity to re-purpose content is even better. Your followers will jump at the chance to learn from you live an interact with you.

Plan a webinar, tell your following about it in advance, and have them register for it ahead of time. Add the people who register for your webinar to your email list – these people are usually warm leads. You can record the webinar and re-purpose it later as a YouTube video, in a blog post, or as membership site content.

5. Use infographics

Aside from videos and interactive content like creative quizzes, infographics pack the most shareability into your social media posts.

Infographics do so well because of how instantaneously they deliver their message. Users don't have to read through an entire article or watch a video for the value to be received. Bright, visually-appealing infographics that utilize fast facts and statistics do very well in terms of engagement. If you don’t have the time, nor the resources for infographics, at least insert photos into your posts (you can even do this with a smartphone camera) to attract attention.

Getting creative with social media is now non-optional for most marketers. Since the entire world is just about on top of the fact that social media marketing and advertising works, consumers are getting bombarded with posts from the brands they follow ion a daily basis.

Ad blindness makes it nearly impossible for your vanilla status update or ad to have any impact on your following. Adding some of these shareable social media post ideas to your strategy will help improve your engagement and create more meaningful relationships with your followers.