Effective Writing for Social Media

Strong writing skills are essential for anyone looking to build up a presence on social media because our writing is often the only form of communication we have with our audiences on social media. While writing on social media can be much more casual than other situations such as creating financial reports for your organization, it is still very important that your writing on social media is written a professional matter that promotes your personal brand or organizational brand. Successful social media writers create messages that are relevant for their audiences and resonates with them on an emotional or personal level. You also want to ensure that the messages you are writing are aligned with your brand or company’s mission and beliefs. There are six Cs of effective writing for social media that can help you achieve these goals: Content, Community, Culture, Conversation, Creativity and Connection.

Aside from utilizing the six Cs to create effective writing for social media, there are several other skills and tips social media writers can use to create content that positively promotes their brand. One of the easiest things to use, but often gets forgot about, is avoiding grammar and writing mistakes when posting to social media. This can be especially difficult in situations where you are trying to be the first person to post about a topic because you are so worried about being the leader in this topic that you do not take the time to read over your post before sending out for everyone on the internet to read. The easiest way to avoid sending out posts with writing and grammar mistakes is to take an extra 10 seconds to quickly read over your post. I am actually surprised by the number of tweets or Instagram posts I see with very blatant spelling or grammar mistakes that could have easily been avoided. When a post contains these mistakes, it brings the overall image of the entire brand down. This is especially true for organization social media pages and other professional accounts. Many organizations have entire departments devoted to social media, so there is no excuse for the posts to contain spelling or grammar errors.

One of the last things I wanted to touch on concerning the creation of effective writing on social media is always put your audience first and consider their wants and needs as social media users. Your goal should be to create content that they not only like, but want to share with their other friends on and off social media. You should want your audience to feel compelled to share the information on social media and the only way to do this is to create strong, effective content that connects with your audience on a personal level. The content you create on social media should also be entertaining because this will give your audiences more opportunities to remember and share what they felt and saw with others. For example, the funny, sarcastic posts of Wendy’s are much easier to remember for me than the straight forward posts of McDonald's. Not only are these posts easier to remember, but I am also much more likely to share a Wendy’s tweet with my friends than a tweet sent from McDonald's.