Social Media Copywriting

Ask any professional copywriter and they’ll tell you it’s much harder to write short copy than long.

It’s much more difficult to get your message across when you only have a few characters to play with. That’s why social media copywriting is so tough and why so many people get it wrong.

How many times have you seen a random Tweet that’s full of abbreviations that makes no sense whatsoever? What about Facebook updates that ramble on and on?

In this post, I want to look at how to write effective social media updates that have meaning.

Twitter

Twitter is probably one of the hardest platforms to write for, purely because you only have 140 characters to play with.

As I mentioned above, the temptation is to squeeze as many abbreviations in as possible to ‘cheat’ the character limit.

But that usually ends up in a bizarre tweet that few people will bother looking at.

Writing short copy is difficult, but also a great way of honing your writing skills. After all, with only 140 characters to play with it’s essential that every word you use counts.

You can tighten your message by cutting out unnecessary adjectives (something that will also help your general sales writing) and by getting to the point straightaway.

Keep your tweet to one topic and remember to add a link if you want to direct people to an article or web page that backs up your tweet.

Keeping your updates short like this will also help your followers. If they like what you say and want to retweet it, by keeping your character count down they should be able to do so without having to go in and edit it down.

Facebook

Although Facebook gives you far more room for your updates, it is still good practice to keep them punchy and to the point.

If you post rambling updates no one is going to want to read them, so keep them short, relevant and interesting.

Also, if you want to raise your reach on Facebook ask for comments and reactions. The more reactions your post gets, the more newsworthy it becomes, which will increase its appearance in news feeds.

By adding video, polls and images you can increase your level of engagement, but what’s also important is to remember to post when your followers are likely to be online. The scheduling tool is perfect for this.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is more about business and less about personal interaction. It is a platform from which you can show your expert status within your field. That means comments about needing a coffee, what you had for lunch etc., are not really going to be all that effective.

For LinkedIn look at posting news stories that are relevant to your industry and add your comments and opinions. This will encourage others to do the same and get a conversation started.

It’s also a great place to share news about your company, whether you’re hiring new people, starting a new exciting project or diversifying.

This social media platform opens up the opportunity for longer updates, but again they must be relevant and interesting.

As you can see, social media copywriting can be a complex animal, but it is also a great way to practice your short copy skills.