Copywriting for Social Media – Here Are 5 Things to Know
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Looking for some tips on copywriting for social media?
Whether you’re just beginning to craft copy for your social channels, or you’re experienced and looking to soup up your existing copywriting tactics – this blog is for you. Writing compelling copy for socials is an art all of its own, requiring different copywriting skills to any other form of marketing copywriting.
Below we’ll share some simple but effective tips for copywriting for social media.
If you’re on the hunt for a paid social agency for your business’s social media management, we can help you plan a social media strategy that brings that all-important engagement to your social media platforms. Reach out to [email protected] or give us a call at 0161 327 2635.
Copywriting for Social Media: Advice from A Paid Social Expert
Emma Sowersby is a Paid Social Executive here at Embryo. She’s tasked with creating ‘stop-you-in-your-tracks’ social media posts for Embryo’s clients on a daily basis.
I asked Emma to give us her thoughts on exactly what makes social media copy compelling:
‘Effective social media copy has the tough job of capturing the audience’s attention within seconds. So, make it count! For me, good social media copy boils down to three key elements: understanding your audience, being aware of how to effectively communicate with them, and providing a clear direction for what you want them to do.’
For our first tip, let’s dig into Emma’s first piece of advice – to understand your audience.
1. Know Who You’re Talking To
If you’re posting in the hopes of getting social media engagement back, you’re effectively in a conversation with your followers. As with any effective conversation, you can’t just endlessly talk – you also have to listen.
Use the data you have at your disposal to better understand your core audience. That way you can hone your messaging. Knowing who you’re talking to will help you understand your followers, and therefore help you communicate with them more personally and more effectively.
Dig into the analytics tools available to you in order to find a clearer picture of who your customer is.
Social Media Analytics
The top social media platforms for businesses all have analytics capabilities that allow you to understand the demographics of your following including their gender, age, location and interests. Here you can drill down into who views and engages with your posts. Some of these include:
- Instagram Insights
- LinkedIn Page Analytics
- Twitter Analytics
- TikTok Analytics
- Facebook Audience Insights
Website Analytics: GA4
Web analytics tools like GA4 can also be a useful tool for helping ascertain who browses your website. The ability to access information about your site users in the form of a Google Analytics Audience Report can be a really useful window into the demographics of your potential shopper and their user journey.
Why Would This Be Important to Know If You’re Copywriting for Social Media?
Here’s an example.
Imagine a kitchenware brand. It’s tricky to know who might be browsing your site, as it’s a broad category – after all, we all need kitchenware. You can make broad-stroke assumptions based on the USPs of the kitchenware you stock, but that’s all: assumptions.
With GA4 you could find out that you’re picking up a more mature, rural-dwelling audience. Your brand voice will remain consistent but your copy can target them specifically. You might then choose to focus on the quality of the pans or user guides for your pre-seasoned cast iron pans.
The point is this – the more you know about your followers, the more you can tailor your social media copy and make it relevant to them. Focus your content’s pain points and solutions on a specific, data-backed persona and you’ll soon see better engagement results.
2. Take Advantage of Social Search
The next of our tips for copywriting for social media is to make sure you’re being seen by the right people.
As you’re probably aware, most social platforms have their own search function to help connect users to content that is relevant to their interests. The way to be seen in them in most cases is to make use of hashtags.
Using an effective hashtag connects you with followers who are more likely to have an active interest in your brand. This fills your sales funnel from the very top – bringing users who are most likely to engage with you directly to your brand. From there it’s your job to transition them from awareness to transaction.
By the way, if you’re going to start using hashtags make sure that they’re formatted in CamelCase. In this style, the first letter of each word is capitalised, even when they run into each other. This makes the hashtag easier to read e.g. #BetterRoastPotatoesEver
3. Don’t Be Boring
There’s often intense debate about how often you should post on social channels for optimum results in order to appease the algorithms of whichever social media platforms you’re posting to. Once a week, twice a week, once a day, twice a day…
This is the wrong attitude to take – don’t post just for the sake of posting. Churning out generic content won’t generate better engagement. In fact, it’s more likely to annoy your followers. Focus on quality over quantity.
In the attention economy, people’s time is a valuable currency that you must fight to earn. Remember that you have limited time to capture their attention so keep your writing snappy, worth saying and full of personality. You shouldn’t be reaching character limits. When reviewing your content ask yourself if you could reduce the word count. Your captions should be all killer, with no filler.
4. Remember You’re Speaking to a Human
By this, I mean always keep in mind that your message is going to reach an actual person. Your copy should seek to engage them, which means speaking directly to them in order to make them sit up and take notice.
That’s why you should always keep in mind when you’re copywriting for social media that you’re directly addressing an individual, not just a faceless crowd e.g. by using ‘you’ and ‘your’.
Another good rule of thumb to follow for copywriting on social media is to use active voice instead of passive voice. It’s worth taking time to understand this fully, but in essence, using passive voice is more detached and less direct in how it makes its point. In active voice, the action takes place directly.
Here’s an example of a caption for a new product for our imagined kitchenware brand from earlier:
‘Say hello to our new cast iron crepe pan!’
- Addresses the reader directly
- Creates excitement around the new product
- Uses active voice: more engaged & direct in making the point
‘Our store has had a new cast iron crepe pan arrive in stock.’
- Doesn’t address the reader directly
- The tone is neutral and doesn’t generate excitement
- Uses passive voice: more detached & roundabout in making the point
5. Give a Next Step
Are you getting some good engagement results on social media posts but need to improve your click-through rate? Remember to prompt readers to take specific action.
Ask them to ‘find out more‘, ‘shop now‘ or ‘get offer‘, to name a few examples.
Take note of what prompts action best and work it into your content strategy. Are your followers motivated by time-limited offers? You might want to prompt them to use a discount code. Do you get good engagement from posting recipes? Getting a user to site with this kind of content can be the next step on the customer’s journey to purchase.
Ready for a New Paid Social Strategy?
Find out how we could help with copywriting for social media posts on your business’s social channels. We can seamlessly take on your brand voice and craft a winning social media management strategy. Get in touch today.
