A large percentage of the contents that go viral online usually involve quizzes or some other form of interaction with the audience. A BuzzSumo and Moz study recently showed that the contents that are most shared online are those that have something in relation to the user, such as an easy-to-take quiz. For content to go viral, there are two things that aid it. One is that the format of the content is interactive and secondly, there is an encouragement to share it.
Experts are already predicting that there will be more interactive content being created going forward, as opposed to the regular content with just texts.
The big question now is, how do you incorporate interactive features and elements on your WordPress site to make your content more engaging and interactive? Make use of WordPress plugins! That’s the answer to the question in simple terms. There are quite a number of WordPress plugins that you can use to boost the engagements on your website contents, and there are different ways to use them.
Let The Users Generate The Content
Visitors on your site would love that you post their content on your site. But, in reality, this is an effective way of using your readers to add to the content on your site. You can use a plugin such as Listly for creating a blog post that’s curated.
You can also use question and answer plugins like WP Answers, DW Question & Answer, or Q&A from WPmudev, to create a question and answer community section on your WordPress site. This is very much what Yahoo Answers and Quora is about. It is very effective for creating user-generated content on your website.
There are also a number of plugins that let you create a leader board and award points to your most active users. This increase the engagement on your site and encourages more users to participate as a result of the competition that you have created with these plugins.
Create Polls and Quizzes Regularly
There are many sites, with BuzzFeed and PlayBuzz being common examples, which have been able to attract huge levels of traffic simply by the use of interactive elements such as quizzes to get large engagements and shares on their contents.
Creating polls and quizzes is one of the most effective ways to attract engagements to your content and traffic on your site. These elements are interactive and tend to go viral very quickly.
There are a number of WordPress plugins that you can use to create opinion polls, personality tests and quizzes on your website. Examples of such plugins are Dilemma, Apester Interactive Content, SurveyFunnel, and Riddle.
If you do not have the time to create your own quizzes or polls, or you want to save yourself that trouble, an easy way out is to use get interactive content, to your WordPress site from PlayBuzz. is using PlayBuzz Plugin. This plugin gives you access to the search panel on PlayBuzz, allowing you to search for content on the PlayBuzz site. After finding something that you like, you can apply it directly to your content without having to leave the editor.
Allow Interaction on Your Website Through Chats
Many people might not know this, but you can make it possible for your website users to engage themselves in a chat. You can use a plugin such as Private Messages for UserPro to give your website a chat function. This particular plugin, however, requires that the UserPro plugin for WordPress User Profile is installed on your website.
This will enable your users to chat privately with themselves. They will also be able to receive new notifications on their devices when they have a new message, or there’s a new conversation.
Another WordPress plugin that allows you to add this function to your website is Chat by WPmudev. This plugin allows you to set up private chats, public chat sessions, BuddyPress Friend chats, BuddyPress Group chats, chat between the network users and the site, and so on.
Your site visitors can access your site via Facebook credentials, Google+ or Twitter, and not just through the standard BuddyPress or WordPress account. This consequently increases the level of interaction on your website, and you have your website visitors spending more time chatting with others on your website and increasing your site traffic.
Include Board Games
You can take advantage of free plugins such as H5P to include board games, flashcards, ‘drag the words’, memory games, and a host of other elements that boost engagement and interaction on your website. You can use these interactive elements irrespective of whether your site is for adults or for kids to increase the amount of time that your visitors take on your website.
This is an element that can help you to increase the dwell time of your site and boost your ranking on Google search. This consequently increases the visibility of your website on Google. These interactive plugins can also help to reduce the bounce rate on your website and increase the visit duration.
Use Responsive Image Maps
Responsive image maps are a fun and interesting way to show information that images carry. Image Hotspotter is a plugin which helps you to use and develop responsive image maps that are both interactive and user-friendly. When your website user moves their cursor over a particular image on your website, a lightbox pops up showing more of the image’s information.
This is an interactive method for your website users to easily browse through the image content on your website. This tool is very ideal and will work more effectively for art sites or photography websites that want to tell more about a particular image instead of just offering an enlarged version of it.
Introduce Gamification to Your Website
Gamification is just you adding some elements or applications to your site such as rewards, leaderboards, virtual currencies, points, and so on.
An example of using gamification to increase engagement on the content on your WordPress site is rewarding users for particular actions such as commenting on the post, writing reviews, sharing the content, or dropping feedback on your content.
TripAdvisor is one of the numerous websites using gamification. This encourages their users to write a review of the different places that they have been to. They are then awarded points which they can use for flyer miles. When you give your visitors rewards in this manner, it can make them a little addictive, and then the amount of time that they spend on your website trying to consume your comment and engage your content increases.
You can add gamification to your website with a plugin such as Achievements for WordPress. This plugin gamifies your website with points, badges, and challenges, and these are useful in encouraging your users to engage your content.
You can create a friendly competition on your website with rankings and leaderboards, and award your users with a point as they engage your content or add their contribution to any discussion.
Another plugin that works similarly is the Captain Up plugin. Installing this plugin also allows you to reward your users with points, badges, and levels, for how much engagement they have on your website. It also allows you to create a leaderboard for them which keeps your users stuck on your website.
Ask For Feedbacks and Ratings on Your Content
There are some sites that do not allow comments on their blog, they would rather ask their site visitors for feedbacks and ratings on their content using different emoticons. If you prefer this as well, there are numerous WordPress rating plugins such as MyEffecto, FL3R FeelBox, and Voting – Feelbacks plugin, that allow you to do this on your site. These plugins are a different way for readers to immediate responses to your post, so you know if they liked what they have read or not. This will give you an idea of the kind of content that your readers enjoy.
Conclusion
Many people are already beginning to understand the importance of creating content on your website that is interactive and can easily bring about more engagement to your website. As this knowledge becomes more popular, many people will incorporate interactive content on their website and many of the WordPress plugins that were mentioned in this article will be put to use in their different ways.
As experts have predicted, interactive content will soon become a norm as bloggers, brands, and businesses continue to look for ways to create viral content and make their website stand out, increase their visibility on Google, their Google ranking and the amount of traffic on their site.
There are a lot of other steps that you can take to make the content on your website more engaging, such as using catchy and attractive titles, breaking your texts down into smaller units with subheadings and bullet points to make it more readable, adding images to your post, consistently delivering high-quality contents, and so on. But WordPress plugins are actually created to provide you with engagements on your bio. When properly used, they are a massive tool to ensure that users engage with your content and share them, which may lead to the content becoming viral.