20 Fitness Engagement Posts & Interactive Content Ideas

Want to know how to make your fitness content truly engaging? Likes, comments, and shares help you build a loyal following and signal your posts are resonating with your target audience. Social media algorithms also use engagement levels as a ranking factor, so the more people that interact initially, the more other people they’ll show your content to. 

In this article, we share 20 fitness engagement posts and proven strategies for increasing likes, comments, and interactions on your social media.

We’re a specialist fitness marketing agency with 15+ years of industry experience, so we know first-hand what works (and what doesn’t!). We help gyms, fitness studios, and personal trainers promote their businesses effectively using social media. Learn more about our social media services here.

Engagement is all about getting people to interact with you. This means likes or reactions, comments, shares, follows, and clicks. If 1%-5% of your audience interacts with your post, then that’s considered a good engagement rate.

So how can you give your levels a boost? Here are the content types and strategies we use to increase engagement for our marketing clients…

1 – Fitness questions

When it comes to interactive engagement posts, asking questions should be high on your list. They immediately prompt a two-way conversation and encourage people to comment. In fact, ‘question’ posts get 100% more comments than statements according to data from Neil Patel.

• ‘What’s your favorite’ fitness questions (e.g. workout/warm-up/leg exercise etc.)
• ‘Would you rather’ fitness questions (e.g. do sprint intervals for 10 mins or mountain climbers for 5 mins)
• ‘What’s your top tip for…’ questions (e.g. eating healthily while traveling for work)
• ‘Who is your fav instructor and why’ questions
• ‘What’s your workout goal’ questions (e.g. today, this week, this month, this year)

2 – ‘Tag a friend who…’ posts

Create gym posts, funny fitness quotes, or workout content that’s highly shareable, and tell people to tag a friend. This drives comments and shares which increases engagement and grows your following too.

A few examples of posts that you can use are…

• ‘Tag a friend who’d love this workout’.
• ‘Tag a friend who needs strength training in their life’.
• ‘Tag a friend who’s as obsessed with Pilates as you are’.
• ‘Tag a friend who hates burpees more than you’.
• ‘Tag your bestest workout buddy’.
• ‘Tag a friend who might benefit’.

Sharing gym and workout partner quotes specifically on social media is a great excuse to ask people to tag a friend and generate lots of interaction.

This article contains affiliate links so we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps fund our free content and guides 🙂

3 – Engaging fitness GIFs

GIFs make brilliant fitness engagement posts for social media. Honestly, who doesn’t love a good GIF?!

They’re an easy way to make people smile and show your personality. GIFs drive lots of comments, tags, and shares which means engagement goes crazy. Bonus points if you can relate it to your niche in some way.

Some social platforms like Twitter have a menu of ready-made GIFs you can choose from. But for others, you can use a tool like Giphy to find suitable ones.

4 – Call-to-action posts

If you’re not using call-to-action posts in your social media content, you need to jump on it asap. This is where you mention a workout strategy or fitness freebie in your post, then ask people to ‘comment FREEBIE and I’ll DM it to you’. Doing this boosts your post’s visibility and engagement, so they have more chances to go viral – the more people comment, and receive DM, the better it is for algorithms!

The most efficient way to set this up is using Manychat, an Instagram-approved tool that automatically sends DMs on your behalf. This way you don’t need to send every follow-up manually and can spend time on other areas of your business.

Including a call to action like this is standard practice for professional marketing agencies and an easy way to encourage more engagement on every single post. But with Manychat you have the added bonus of shifting the conversation to the DMs where you can send them a link to your opt-in freebie. So you’re not only driving engagement, you’re generating email subscribers and leads too!

5 – Exercise polls

When it comes to fitness engagement posts, polls are highly effective. They’re an easy way to encourage interaction and gain customer insights at the same time.

Social media polls are effective for two reasons: 1) they don’t demand much effort from the audience, and 2) people are naturally inquisitive so they want to know what everyone else put!

Using the poll sticker in Instagram Stories is super simple. You can also add a voting option to Instagram posts, carousels, and Reels.

It’s easy for someone to choose from 2-3 pre-written answers and vote for their choice. Much easier than writing a comment from scratch, which is why so many more people interact with a poll than a standard post.

Here are some poll ideas for more interactive fitness posts:

• ‘What’s your favourite’ questions
• ‘Would you rather’ questions
• ‘This or that’ polls
• ‘Get to know me’ questions
• ‘Do you want to’ polls

6 – Interactive quiz posts

Posting quizzes on your social accounts can generate lots of interaction in the comments. You can use this type of fitness content to bust common myths in your industry, increase audience education, or pique their interest in your subject matter. With a little pre-planning, you can also use quizzes for high-quality lead generation too. 

People love to be the person with the right answer which is why quizzes do so well online. Start small by posting an image and asking your quiz question in the caption (if you’re feeling generous you can give them multiple-choice answers to select from). You can even turn this into a competition by offering a prize to someone randomly selected from the comments.

7 – User-generated content

Featuring user-generated content (UGC) is an excellent way to generate engagement. The people whose content you include will like, comment, and share. And their audiences and followers will do the same. And so will the people who want to be featured in the future too. 

According to Taggbox, 72% of brands say UGC helps them engage customers and build a strong connection with them. Easy ways to do this include sharing…

• Photos
• Reviews
• Testimonials

It doesn’t need to be high-tech or polished – screenshots or regrams both work well for these posts.

8 – Personality posts

People engage with people, not bland brands. So show a bit of personality in your fitness account’s social posts to encourage more engagement. Try using humor and authenticity to attract like-minded followers on the same wavelength as you. These are the people who will engage most with the content you’re publishing.

You might also like… 7 Ways To Differentiate Yourself In a Crowded Industry.

9 – Ask me anything

Ask Me Anything (AMA) posts or live videos flip the question format on its head and can boost engagement massively. It gives followers the opportunity to ask you a question, enabling you to provide additional value or insights, and them to benefit from your juicy answer. People not only comment with their questions but typically share the post with others, which is why they’re great for engagement.

10 – Tap into trends

Riding the wave of trending topics can hugely increase engagement. It’s a surefire way to ensure your content is hyper-relevant and if you get in early, position yourself as a thought leader on the topic. 

This might mean sharing your views on the latest fitness trend or tapping into awareness days that are relevant to your niche. By jumping on trends that already have traction, you can tap into interested audiences who are more likely to interact with your content.

11 – Feature customers

Featuring customers in your fitness engagement posts is another great way to drive interaction. You can share case studies, success stories, or simply highlight the work that they’re doing for your followers. It’s a way to champion your clients and show that you care about them.

When your audience sees you sharing stories about people just like them, they’re more likely to engage with what you’re posting. By tagging the people you’re featuring, you’ll also get engagement from their family, friends, and followers.

12 – Actionable, value-packed fitness posts

It’s really easy to fall into the trap of focusing on what you want to promote. But the key to engagement is creating fitness content that’s valuable to your audience. This is the stuff they’ll like, share, and interact with. 

So take a moment to look over your last few posts and ask yourself objectively, do they offer value to my followers? Or have you become sidetracked with what you want to talk about or promote? If it’s the latter, think about the most insanely useful thing you could share with your audience and then post it.

You might also like… 7 Types of Social Media Content Your Fitness Audience Will Love.

13 – Contests

Running contests is a brilliant way to increase engagement on social media. Ask people to comment, like, and share in order to be entered into the competition. You can also collab with other complimentary health and fitness accounts to pool resources and expand your reach.

With the right prize up for grabs, you can substantially boost engagement levels and grow your follower base too. Offering additional entries for people who tag others is a great way to expand your audience through word of mouth. 

14 – Photo & Video Content

According to research by digital marketing expert Neil Patel, photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs than text posts. That’s a huge increase in engagement metrics simply by changing the format of your post.

Research by Agorapulse also shows that photos get more engagement on Instagram than graphics. In their experiment, likes were 156% higher on photos and comments were 302% higher! They’ve previously found that colour photos performed better than black and white ones. 

Interestingly, photos don’t need to feature people to get more engagement. Hootsuite ran tests and found no difference – they concluded that content aligned with ‘your brand and what your audience loves’ does best. For health and fitness brands, this means flatlays of nutritional products, photos of plush gym interiors, and mesmerizing workout settings are all fair game.

Top tip – If you don’t have time to source photos, our ready-made image posts are a quick and easy solution.

Videos are also hugely effective at increasing engagement on social media. They get 2x more engagement on Instagram and 10x more on Twitter. So, while they take more time and effort to create, this is rewarded with more engagement. 

15 – Respond to comments & engage with others 

Engagement is a two-way activity so be sure to respond to comments that you receive. It’s polite for humans and has benefits for the algorithms too. 

If people see that you’ve acknowledged and responded to their comment, it makes for a more satisfying experience. They’ll be more likely to engage again in the future and this is how loyal customer bases are built. The algorithms also see this back and forth as a positive sign about your post so will show it to more people.  

In our experience, another good way to boost engagement is to interact with other accounts just before and after we post something. It helps put us on their radar – if they see a notification that we’ve commented on something, they’re more likely to check out our account and comment on our latest post. Reciprocity goes a long way, particularly on Instagram and X/Twitter. 

16 – Post consistently

There’s a correlation between engagement levels and how often you post. For most platforms there’s a sweet spot where posting frequently maximises engagement, but posting too much leads to a drop off. 

The precise timing varies on every platform – for Facebook and Twitter it’s several times per day whereas for Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, it averages out at once per day. But frequency does affect engagement and platforms tend to reward accounts that post regularly with more views and engagement.

17 – Avoid links

The data on this is clear – social media posts that include links receive less views and engagement. 

• Facebook posts without links receive double the engagement [Social Insider]
• Tweets without links get 1.4x more impressions, therefore have higher engagement potential [ilo.so]
• LinkedIn posts without links get 6x more reach, 4x more reactions, and 18x more comments [Hootsuite]

So, use links sparingly in your social posts if engagement is your goal. Including them is typically important for lead generation posts but alternative these ones with several posts that don’t have links. This will enable you to maximise engagement while still generating those all-important sales leads for your brand.

18 – Jump on new platform features

A final bonus tip from us – jump on whatever new feature a platform launches. In the past it’s been live video, shorts, reels, stories, but who can predict what will be next.

What matters is the platforms want to test these new features extensively so they’ll show them to as many people as possible after launch. This means that if you’re quick to use them, you’ll get an algorithmic boost (and who couldn’t benefit from a few extra eyeballs)?

19 – Find engagement-boosting hashtags

Hashtags can transform your engagement levels but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Hashtags that generate likes and comments for one account may get zero traction for another. Which is why we’ve found the most effective approach is to test different ones out. 

General hashtags related to your brand or product might seem like the way to go. But ask yourself honestly – are they really going to generate interaction? Will they help get you more likes, comments and shares? 

You might also like… 101 best fitness hashtags for followers & likes.

A more effective approach is to make it about your audience, not yourself. Which hashtags are your ideal client or target market likely to search for? Hashtags focused on communities, locations, and tips are all excellent for generating engagement. For example, a London gym wanting might use hashtags like #londonfitfam, #westminster and #winterrunningtips.  

In terms of how many hashtags to use, posts that use more hashtags get less engagement. But it’s unclear whether using more hashtags causes lower engagement or is just a reflection of algorithms. Perhaps big brands with lots of engaged followers don’t need to use lots of hashtags because the algorithms will show their posts widely regardless. So, don’t cut your hashtags until you’ve tested different options for yourself.

20 – Track what works

Look at social media metrics to analyze which of your previous posts have got the most engagement. Is there anything they have in common? Are they a similar style of content or posted at the same time of day? Look for patterns of success and then do more of what’s already working well for you. 

Get Ready-Made Fitness Posts for Social Media

Save time and improve marketing results using ready-made fitness content for Instagram. Our done-for-you social media bundles are designed to drive engagement, follower growth, and client leads.

We’ll create custom-branded content using your colors and logo, that aligns with your marketing goals. You’ll receive a tailored bundle of 375+ Instagram posts suitable for carousels, stories, and reels – that’s over a year’s worth of content taken care of!