The ever-changing social platform algorithms make it increasingly harder to generate engagement with your social media posts. By applying some simple writing tips, however, you can make your message more appealing to more people.
Having a social media strategy and action plan, based on your unique business goals, resources and available time, is essential to your success.
Yet even with a well laid out action plan, you still need to create social media posts and content that speak to your identified audience, and inspire them to take action.
Following are the seven social media content writing tips for creating posts that get the attention of your target audience, and inspire engagement:
1. Do your research
If you want your audience to notice and engage with your social posts, you need to make them highly relevant to your target group.
The more relevant your posts are, the more success you will have – but relevance, in general, is not enough. You need to take the time to truly understand your audience. Start with the general demographic information and then go deeper.
2. Speak their language
Take your research further and learn what language your ideal clients use to communicate their needs or challenges. Use this language when writing your posts to ensure your content resonates with your audience. This will help to show them that you truly understand them and their challenges.
3. Develop your voice
Although you should write social media posts in the language of your target audience, the overall message should be written in your own voice.
Your voice (or your brand voice) refers to the personality and emotion infused into all your marketing activities and social interactions online – you create that voice with the language and tone you use when writing your content or interacting with your audience.
4. Be positive
This doesn’t mean every post needs to be happy – there’s a huge difference between positive and happy. You want your audience to be excited, and inspired by your posts, and that doesn’t always mean happy posts.
Whatever you do, avoid criticizing anyone (or any business) publicly. Criticizing others is not only unprofessional but also dangerous – it can draw more negative people to your page, and can hurt any trust or credibility you’ve built with your existing followers.
5. Keep it short and simple
People value their time. If you want your audience to give you their attention, you need to show that you value their time also.
Great ways to do this include:
- Using headings, bullets and lists where possible to make your content or posts easier to scan
- Keeping paragraphs to only two or three sentences
- Being as succinct as possible when writing on your topic
6. Use images and videos
Use images, graphics and videos to tell a story where possible. Visual content is more engaging, and can often tell the story quicker and more succinctly than words alone. In fact, an image or video can often stand alone in social media posts while still conveying the full message to your audience.
For the best results, optimize each piece of visual content for the platform you’re posting it on to ensure your message is being shared, and that you look professional.
7. Add a call to action
At the end of your content or social posts, consider prompting your audience with what action you’d like them to take next by including a call to action (CTA). Without one, most people won’t take any action after reading your content, even if they enjoyed it and derived value from it.
CTAs come in different forms and have different purposes. For example, you can motivate your audience to take action with these CTAs:
- Ask them to like or share your social media posts
- Ask a question they can answer in the comments
- Direct them to another piece of content
- Send them to the landing page
Increase your success with these social media content writing
The competition for your audience’s time and attention can be fierce. The secret to being successful is to not compete, but rather to set yourself apart from the crowd by creating and sharing content and social posts your audience will want to consume.