Interviews are a fantastic tool for generating content for a website, blog or social media account and involve very little work on your part compared with what you get in return.
What’s more, interviews are highly social and lend themselves perfectly to getting shared.
But at the same time, we’ve seen a lot of interviews on the web now and it’s getting to the point where they can be a little predictable. If you don’t have the most exciting person to interview then you need to think hard about how you’re going to make your content stand out in other ways.
So how about doing something a little bit different and a little bit fun with your interview instead of just relying on the usual structure of set questions? Here are some potential ideas.
A Challenge
The point of an interview is to tell the readers something about the person being questioned – and often the hope is that they’ll learn more from your interview than is being stated explicitly. In other words, your questions should be chosen in such a way that they’ll provide more insight than is immediately apparent on the surface of it.
But we demonstrate aspects of our personality in everything we do – and this includes, for instance, writing stories, drawing pictures or making music. Instead of asking your interviewees to answer questions, how about asking them to draw a two minute self-portrait? It’s fun, it lends itself to becoming an interview series, rather than just a one off, and interviewees are more likely to take notice of you for doing something different.
Quizzes
Have you ever done an online questionnaire that tells you what Friends character you are? Or what Meyers Briggs personality type? How about using these to learn more about your interviewee in a fun way? Again it’s a bit different and if you’re combine the right quiz with the right influencer, it can have some quite funny/interesting results.
Aggregated Interviews
Sourcing lots of different articles and blogs from around the web creates aggregate content. An aggregate interview then would be answers from multiple interviews, collected into a single article. Tie it together with a common theme and this can provide a lot of value in a short space – like a highlight reel of interviews!
As you can see, there are many creative alternatives to the standard interview, so think a little outside the box!
