Best Practices for Brands to Write More “Like-Able” Social Media Copy
Social media has become the “hangout spot” for most people today, and smart brands are actively utilizing these platforms to engage with their target audience.
If your brand, too, is looking forward to connecting with its audience on social media, it means you will most probably deploy social media advertising like running Facebook ads and building your brand presence on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, and so on.
Honestly speaking, there are so many social media sites, with each of them having different length and tone requirements, so it is quite easy for a brand to get confused about which platform they should start from when it comes to social media copywriting. But fortunately, we have some best practices that brands can follow and get started with social media copywriting.
What follows are seven tips that help you create social media copies that can grab more likes, shares, hearts, or retweets!
- Frame Your Brand Guidelines for Social Media Copy
First things first, you must determine who your brand wants to be on social media. While this might sound very simple at first, it can get more complex than what you had expected initially. For example, do you want to have the same voice on social media platforms as you have across different channels such as websites, local advertising, email marketing, or outdoor advertising?
The primary purpose of social media was to bring people together and help them stay connected. These platforms provide brands with a unique opportunity to flaunt their fun side, whether through constant fun social media copywriting or by showcasing their jolly employees. If you follow popular brands on social media, the chances are that you have come across their playful captions or tweets.
Start writing down some solid brand copywriting guidelines, add social media to it, and there you go!
- Set a Goal for Every Social Media Post
While one can easily set goals for their every ad on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, when it comes to goal setting for organic posts, things get tricky.
Just in case you missed it, whenever you are creating a social media campaign, the given platform will ask you to pick a goal to focus your ads on and boost its performance. From branding to clicks to conversions, your goal could be anything.
So if you are thinking about how you can set goals for your organic social media posts, why not begin with the goals that you generally set for your paid adverts and then expand your options from there? For example, you can try considering these:
- Branding
- Clicks
- Conversions
- Likes, Comments, and Shares
- Direct Messages
- Followers
Once you have established the goal, you can easily gauge the success of your organic posts. That brings us to the next and most crucial point – Copywriting!
- Write for the Audience on Every Platform
When it comes to social media copywriting, the critical thing to remember is that every platform is built differently to satisfy the different needs of different groups of audiences. Meaning, the copy you created for Facebook should not be used on LinkedIn and vice versa. In fact, when preparing those brand guidelines we discussed in the first point, try to pinpoint the most formal and informal your brand should/would be on social media in order to set some boundaries.
There are numerous social media platforms, like Snapchat and Instagram, that you can use in real-time to showcase your brand’s human side to your audience better. For example, if you had a New Year’s celebration, you can click random photos, record videos, and then add to your Snapchat or Instagram Stories right away. The next day, you can browse through the photos and videos and pick out the best ones for uploading with a simple and casual copy.
- Inspire Engagement
If your brand has decided to look into social media, it probably wants to tap into an audience segment that they are unable to reach via other mediums. And well, let’s be honest, there is no place where you can engage with audiences the way you do on social media. While you are right to get a bit cautious after reading this, it should also be exciting for you.
Many brands tend to only talk about themselves on social media, whether it is to acknowledge their mission, showcase their products or services, or to announce the changes in their organization. Undoubtedly that is a great thing to do, but if you keep on doing just that consistently, it will bore your followers, or even worse, people will stop seeing the value in following your accounts in the first place. Therefore, you need to begin with something more simple such as UGC from a relevant product giveaway or a customer appreciation post. Bringing your brand down to earth is the best way to make your audience feel connected with you.
- Complement the Visual With Relevant Copy
Most B2B brands fail to connect their visuals and copies. And well, direct-to-consumer brands are no exception either.
Don’t just post any visual with a big brand statement, which makes no sense. The best practice to follow for that is working closely with your designers to ensure that your messaging remains united throughout your post.
- Make Wise Use of Hashtags and Emojis
Remember the time when ‘literally’ everybody started using hashtags like all the time on every single post? You would see a one-liner caption on a post followed by at least 5-10 hashtags (there’s nothing to be embarrassed about; we did that too)!
Hashtags work just the same way they used to do earlier before social media platforms took off. In fact, people still use them to explore new content, and influencers are still leveraging them to be discovered. It’s your decision whether or not you will use hashtags in your posts. If you want to tweet about a trending topic on Twitter, just do it. However, outside of Twitter, it is highly recommended to make that a brand choice. Don’t go on adding heaps of hashtags alongside a copy in one post and then not including any in the next one. Consistency matters a great deal.
Likewise, emojis are a useful tool for driving engagement on social media platforms to show that you are staying current with the new generation. However, make sure that the emojis you are using actually means what you think it means before posting it.
- Stay on Top of Social Media Trends
Water is wet. Sounds obvious, right.
Nevertheless, ensure that you or whoever is responsible for your social media copies stay active on the platforms. By this, we don’t just mean staying online. They should be following a variety of accounts across different platforms, keeping up with the latest trends, and be able to participate in the trending challenges.
Stay on top of the trends to be on the top of the mind of your potential customers. Plus, this will be your best defense against social media blunders. All of us have seen them, brands sending out apologies, try not to become one of them.
Wrap Up
When it comes to copywriting, whether it is for ads, websites, or social media, all you need to do is WRITE… a lot. And copywriting should be less about your brand and more about your audience; you should write for them. Draft heaps of different versions of the same social media copy and begin all over again but with a new idea every time, of course, Remember feedback is crucial, so discuss your messaging with your team. You can make this whole process easier for you by planning in advance. So without wasting any time, go ahead and start drafting your social media copies. Employ these seven best practices to make sure they are more “likable.”