5 Top Tips To Write More Likeable Social Media Copy
We’ve talked before about how to cultivate a killer social media strategy that will help you best utilize different platforms to achieve your company’s specific marketing objectives. We also covered how to leverage social media metrics to help maximize your results from your social media marketing campaigns. But at the heart of your social content is of course the actual content and copy!
Like any other form of copywriting, your social copy should be written in a way that feels organic, is on brand, reflecting your company’s unique, and distinctive brand identity, appeals to your audience’s pain points and is worded in a tone of voice that will specifically resonate with your audience. One of the key aspects of social copy that makes it an incredibly strong vehicle for communicating with your audience lies at the core of what a social platform is in the first place, as well as its main purpose.
Social platforms were designed to help people find and grow communities of other like-minded people, build relationships, create influence, and grow followings. This means that your social channel is also the ideal platform to take the opportunity to speak directly to your audience, share your content, ideas, passions, and knowledge as well as start conversations that will not only increase engagement to help you build a following, but also encourage action that will ultimately add more to your bottom line. We’re referring to scroll-stopping content that when crafted effectively will encourage your audience to drive traffic back to your site, continue their process of discovery and generate sales and profits for your company.
Beyond making sure that your social copy adheres to the basic rules of copywriting, there are other key things to keep in mind as well as savvy strategies you can employ to craft copy that will drive meaningful results. So, today we will be exploring how to approach the writing of your social media copy to ensure that your posts are likeable, shareable, tweetable… and overall, powerful! You will learn top tips to write copy that succeeds in delivering the right messaging in the right ways to connect with your audience and grow your brand and social presence.
1. Know Your Goals
Like any other form of copywriting or content that you create for your company, it is vital to have a clear understanding of what your primary goal is for that piece of content. Don’t just write a social post for the sake of writing one, to add another square to your Insta-grid or what-have-you. Because your followers will see right through it and then it will be crickets for your feed….
Again, like any other kind of content you craft, you should know what your main marketing objective is behind it. Are you most interested in driving clicks and conversions? Well, then it will be invaluable if your post includes a CTA. (We will explore the use of CTAs in social posts a little later.) Are you interested in increasing your social presence and getting as many eyes on your content as possible by encouraging shares? Perhaps, what you’re really after is creating the kind of undeniably popular and infinitely heartable post that skyrockets your engagement, leading to a flood of comments and of course, likes. Zeroing in on the goal of your post is a sure-fire way to help you write one that will drive results for your company, as well as inform you on exactly how the post should be written to achieve those results as well.
2. Create Conversations
Social media is ultimately centered around the concept of bringing people together and driving conversations and discourse. So, approach your social copy from the perspective of creating posts that will encourage your audience to continue the conversation. Think about how your audience will receive your post and what they will gain from it. Will they be motivated to interact and engage? A great way of crafting a post that drives discussion and encourages activity from your audience is to write a post in the form of a question. Questions naturally appeal to people’s curiosity, compelling them to think about the content you presented to them, as well as motivating them to participate in the conversation by offering their viewpoint and sharing their ideas or experiences. Questions are also a savvy way of gleaning insights into how your audience thinks, so you can gain a deeper understanding of who your audience is as well as their sensibilities and preferences so you can continue crafting content that will directly resonate with them.
3. Lead with Value
Before you write a social post, you should ask yourself if it will bring value to your audience. Will it offer your audience knowledge, educating them on a specific topic of interest, or will it appeal to their sense of humor and make them literally LOL? You can consider how to add value through your social posts using three main modes of content: posts that educate or inform, posts that amuse and entertain or posts that uplift and inspire. Approaching your social posts in this way is key to helping you create social content that encourages your audience to see you as a continuous source of value, as well as motivates them to keep returning to your feed and tuning in to more of your content.
Educational posts offer a brilliant way of bringing your audience knowledge to clarify any confusion they may have, appeal to their pain points helping to position your company as the solution to their problems as well as directly answer questions they may have. Informative posts also offer the opportunity to present your brand’s USPs, and to express to your audience why your offerings are ultimately a better choice over your competitors. You can use educational posts to also provide your audience insight into who you are on a deeper level, to help solidify and distinguish your brand identity, as well as continue to deliver messages to your audience that communicate your ethos, philosophy and beliefs.
Of course, social media is also an amazing outlet for entertainment. You have probably seen instantly relatable memes before through your feed that tickled your funny bone. You can consider appealing to your audience’s sense of humor or fun by writing a post in a tone of voice that will make them laugh because your content strikes a chord with them or sparks joy.
The last kind of post that adds value to your audience is one that inspires. Social media can be a vehicle to bring light and offer tidbits of meaning in an often confusing and even uncertain world. You can easily create an inspirational post with the use of a famous quote, or write your own post in a way that moves and resonates with your audience on a deeper level and lifts their spirits. These kinds of posts also help you express your belief system, values and ethos to your audience.
4. Cater Your Copy to the Platform
In a previous article, we discussed how to devise your social media marketing strategy to the platform. You should also think about how the way the post is written will work specifically for the social channel you are using it for. LinkedIn is for the most part a professional community with a corporate tone of voice so it is the perfect place to write posts that are educational or informative at their core, and teach your audience pieces of valuable knowledge to drive thought leadership. LinkedIn is also the ideal platform for writing a post that offers your audience insight into the inner workings of your company to encourage people from LinkedIn’s professional community to join your team to grow your company.
You can also, of course, create posts that inform or teach on a platform like Instagram too, but consider the kinds of audience members who will be receiving your post on Instagram. With its laidback and fun vibe, perhaps you would consider loosening up your tone of voice, still speaking from a place of expertise but in a more casual and relatable way.
5. Stop the Scroll
Ultimately, your goal when creating a social post is to encourage your audience to stop scrolling and choose to look at your post over another brand’s. You need to think about how your post will succeed in grabbing your audience’s attention. You can use a hook in your social copy such as a witty or bold headline, a question as we mentioned before to stir conversation, or you can even think about writing a compelling or thought-provoking statement that offers your opinions in a polarizing way. It may seem scary to make too big of a wave on a massive social platform, potentially ruffling other audience’s members’ feathers, but polarizing copy can be invaluable in helping subsections of your audience build a deeper connection with your company and brand — the kind of connection that encourages them to also take action and navigate back to your site to learn more about you and your offerings and even drive conversions.
This brings us to the importance of including CTAs in your posts. Beyond thinking about how you can stop your audience from scrolling past your post, it is important to consider how you can motivate your audience to stop scrolling through the social channel altogether, and instead leave the app to go to your site. You can encourage this kind of activity from your audience by including a clear and concise CTA that directs your audience to take a specific action.
On LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, if you include a CTA in your post such as “Read more” or “Learn more”, you can include actual links in your posts to that content for your audience to find out that information. On Instagram however, you can’t add links directly in posts, and you would instead typically include the phrase, “click the link in bio” somewhere in your post. And for a designated period of time, you would include a link in your bio that is relevant to that particular post. Therefore, along with that CTA tellling your audience to “click the link in the bio,” you may want to consider how the copy in the post could suggest the potential value your audience would gain as well as additional resources they would only be able to acquire by leaving your Instagram post and navigating to the link you include in the bio. This would also help incentivize your audience to follow the CTA, providing them with a sense of urgency to take action.
Social media is an undeniably important element to your overall marketing strategy. But it’s only one piece of the puzzle, and there’s a lot more to get familiar with and master to make sure your digital marketing game is on point. So, how can you ensure it is? By partnering with us experts at Firon Marketing. Talk to us today.
