Posted by Writing copy for social media is a very delicate craft. On the one hand, SMM writing is all about achieving your marketing goals. On the other hand, it’s also about entertaining and informing your audience.
The best you can do as an SMM copy specialist is find the perfect balance between these two goals; your writing should reflect that balance. The following tips will help with planning and creating social media marketing copy that will help you find this balance and create wholesome and effective content.
Be True to Your Voice
One of the biggest challenges a copywriter will face is finding their voice. Not their voice as in speech and vocals, but their writing voice; what kind of personality their writing communicates to its readers. Two writers will cover the same topic in the same writing format, but chances are, their work will be completely different due to their distinct voices.
SMM copy (and copy in general) shouldn’t be dry and voiceless. Be true to yourself and write in a voice that suits you and your personality. If you’re good with humor, inject a few jokes into your SMM copy. Love getting all philosophical? Include a mantra you live by. Your audience will appreciate the authenticity.
(Try to) Keep the Writing Short
Current SMM trends seem to favor shorter content. Look at platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter; their entire lifeline is short content that users can quickly sift through. If your SMM campaign goal is to increase the reach of your content, keep your copy short and sweet.
You don’t have to make all your SMM copy read like tweets, but try to avoid long-winded sentences and thick paragraphs. Be laser-accurate with your words to avoid filling your posts with unnecessary fluff.
Now, you don’t need to apply this rule to every SMM post but do keep in mind that most people’s attention span on social media is quite short. To satisfy this preference for snappy entertainment, keep your SMM content as short as you possibly can.
Adapt Writing to Each Platform
While it does save a lot of time to copy a post from one platform and paste it onto another, it’s not the best way of going about SMM content. Keep in mind that while social media platforms, especially the big ones, cater to very large demographics, each platform is unique in the kind of language that is used there.
This is where your knowledge as an SMM specialist should come in since you need to understand the lexicon, phrasing, and even spelling of different social media platforms. For example, on LinkedIn, a social media platform with a greater focus on employment and professional networking, you should use a more official tone and razor-sharp wording.
Then you have Instagram, which has a greater focus on images; instead of writing long paragraphs, create a more visual carousel. Twitter is a whole different beast with a limited character count.
Audiences can tell when something doesn’t sound right on a particular platform. Adapt your copy to each platform so the language doesn’t seem out of place or inappropriate.
Lighthearted When the Time Is Right
On the topic of knowing what to write and when, there is something that many writers tend to overuse — humor. It’s one thing to insert clever quips and memes into your social media content from time to time. But it’s another to cram jokes into every one of your posts thinking your audience will love them all.
Keep your comedy routine spaced out throughout your social media content calendar. Use humor in moderation to keep your SMM copy from going stale with dad jokes.
Include Visual Content
While this isn’t exactly a writing tip, it can significantly boost the performance of your SMM content. Visuals perfectly complement copy. They go so well together, that I doubt there is one professional social media portfolio that exclusively has one without the other.
Visual content is processed in our brain significantly (we’re talking tens of thousands of times) faster than text. Our brains are hardwired to see something and immediately understand what it is. To add more dimension to your SMM copy, pair it with great visual content to create social media posts that your followers are sure to remember.
Reread and Revise
It may seem a little unnecessary to remind copy and content pros to revise their SMM posts before posting them. But these two very important rituals in the copy-creation process are sometimes glossed over or entirely forgotten.
Make a habit of rereading every bit of SMM copy you’ve written. The last thing you want is cheeky commenters catching spelling errors, or in worse cases, saying something you didn’t mean as a result of a grammatical error.
Work with a Content Calendar
To improve the time it takes to write SMM copy and know what you’re writing about, have an SMM calendar for more consistent posting. Brainstorming and planning SMM copy can go both ways. There are times when new topics and ideas easily come to mind. There are also times when there’s nothing to write about, so you cobble something together and send it out.
To avoid this kind of content blockage, plan your SMM copy in advance. The earlier you brainstorm the content and write it down, the more time you have to iron out the copy and improve on it in the future. You’ll see a noticeable improvement in the quality of your copy, and more importantly, the time it takes to brainstorm and write something new.
Engage Your Audience
Interactions with audiences are what SMM campaigns thrive on. Your copy shouldn’t always be cold, hard facts. It should engage the audience and get them to interact with you and with one another. That’s what creates buzz around a particular social media post.
One of the easiest ways to create more audience engagement is with questions. Ask your audience questions they’ll have fun answering and you can significantly boost their engagement with your content. You can also ask them to vote on or recommend future ideas for content. This method will get them more involved in the content creation process, giving them more reasons to return to your social media page in the future. Interact and engage your followers, as it’s a very effective way to improve audience retention.
Start 2023 with the Right SMM Plan
The beginning of the year is the perfect time to think about your old SMM habits and how you can improve them. All the tips we listed above can be quite helpful, but at the heart of any successful SMM plan lies the willingness and determination to try something new and find novel solutions to old problems.
While it’s already way past New Year’s, make it a resolution to introduce new, healthy habits into your SMM planning and creation. This resolve, in conjunction with the tricks above, should set you on the path of fantastic SMM copy, both behind the scenes and on your feeds.