Social media marketing has become an essential form of brand promotion because sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide some of the most abundant traffic and awareness opportunities. However, as with every other type of outreach, there are certain steps you’ll need to take during the development of marketing material and content to ensure that your efforts produce desirable results. Perhaps, most importantly, you should strive to write posts that are going to capture the attention of your target audience and create positive impressions with informative, entertaining, and interesting concepts. In this guide, we’ll go over eight tips you can use to craft the most compelling and captivating posts for your social media marketing campaign:
1. Use a Conversational and Personal Tone
It’s generally best to avoid formal business writing styles and opt instead for a more relaxed tone when you’re trying to encourage engagement on social media sites. You have to remember that people come to these sites specifically to socialize and be entertained, so you need to focus on fulfilling those two expectations before all else. If your post is too complicated, lengthy, or written in an academic or analytical style, you’ll have a harder time getting people to stop and pay attention to it within the context of social site scrolling.
2. Get to the Point Fast and Keep Posts Relatively Short
Marketing studies have shown that the vast majority of social media users will not spend more than a couple of minutes viewing each post that they encounter. Thus, it’s important that you work the gist of your post into the first 1-2 paragraphs and try to keep each post no longer than 5-7 paragraphs in length. If you absolutely need to write more than that, consider splitting the content into several posts as part of an ongoing series. Use straightforward sentences and try to keep your writing vocabulary at an average level to ensure everyone will be able to easily comprehend what you’re saying.
3. Use a Consistent Voice
You’ve probably noticed that the majority of companies strive to create a personality for their brands within their advertising campaigns. For example, Old Spice and Dos Equis wound up creating some of the most popular ad campaigns of all time by leveraging humor and entertaining characters. Find an angle or approach that is compatible with your marketing goals and stick with it. Whether you opt for a serious and informational approach or a more a comical and entertaining slant will depend on the niche you’re catering to. In any case, try to stay consistent with your writing style across each new post.
4. Create Share-Worthy Content
Choosing the topic of each post is a step that should be given careful consideration because it will ultimately determine the overall shareability of the content. An effective way to find shareable content ideas is to simply research the hottest current trends and try to emulate other posts that have received a lot of likes and shares. Any time you can make the reader laugh or become intrigued by interesting information, you’ll be greatly improving the chances of them wanting to share your content with others, which is where the real benefit of social media marketing comes into play.
5. Create Irresistible Headlines
In this era of clickbait and hype, an attention-grabbing headline is easily one of the most powerful tools you can use to make people gravitate towards your content. You can create the “must-read” effect by ensuring that the headline accurately describes the post or article and using buzzwords to make topics sound more worthwhile. Enticing the reader to stop and take notice of your post will require headlines that evoke emotion and curiosity. As such, you may want to take a course on headline creation to refine your skills in this area.
6. Don’t Forget to Put the “Media” in Social Media
Countless marketing studies have shown that posts which contain imagery and media tend to receive much more attention than those that do not. Try to create videos, infographics, screenshots, photos, and audio clips that will complement your content and keep people interested beyond the typical time spent reading the post itself. If you limit yourself to text-only posts, you’ll be missing out on a significant share of the engagement and traffic that you could be attracting through a media-rich campaign.
7. Check and Edit Content Before Posting
While it’s true that social media posts are usually less formal than other forms of written content, it’s still not good to publish errors because they could hurt your brand’s credibility. Surveys and marketing analysis proves that people view typos, misspellings, and other mistakes as deterrents. On the other hand, maintaining a strong track record of having error-free, well-written posts is one of the best ways to display professionalism.
8. Resonate with Your Audience
Part of creating an effective social media content strategy is staying in tune with your audience’s interests. Publishing relevant and useful posts related to top trends and using familiar terminology and lingo will help to establish your social media page with an authoritative presence in its niche. You want your followers and readers to feel as though you’re one of them, not a marketer or brand who is merely conducting extensive research into the topic you’re writing on and subscribes to industry publications to stay in the loop on hot topics.
Great Social Media Content Will Always Improve Campaign Results
With so many ways to spread brand awareness and generate leads online, it be can be difficult to decide where to focus your efforts. By placing a strong emphasis on producing and publishing high-quality social media posts, you’ll be investing in a type of promotion that is practically guaranteed to improve the public perception of your company or website. In closing, try to stay consistent and incorporate all of the above tips into every post that you craft, and you should see a noticeable improvement in key social marketing metrics like engagement and conversion rates.