Writing for social media
Tips and Techniques
Brooke Harris
MPC 6150
June 2011
Beginning of a Revolution
Using social media to promote your business is a relatively new concept that has grown exponentially in the last several years. More than one-third of Americans say they use a social networking site. And 20 percent say they use it multiple times a day.
Social media emerges from an ancient concept: communication. All humans have a desire to interact, communicate and build relationships. All social media has done is changed where some of this communication takes place. And it has definitely increased the quantity of communication.
It has become a type of social revolution as millions now use social networking every day. It has changed the way humans interact and socialize with one another.
But that’s not all. What started as a way to connect people online for socializing has become a new way to do business. Many companies caught on quickly to the idea of social networking. They use social media for marketing, advertising, customer service and public relations.
History of Social Media Sites
Dating sites were some of the first social networks. In the beginning there were several small social networking sites, but they never really had an impact on society.
The first major social networking site was Friendster, although 90 percent of its traffic came from Asia. Linked In started in 2003 and focused mainly on business networking. MySpace started in 2003. By 2006 it was one of the largest networking sites available. But nothing would compare to the launch of Facebook; it quickly surpassed MySpace. Twitter started shortly thereafter in 2006.
Social Media Benefits for Business
Today four major sites dominate the social networking scene: Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and MySpace. Small, start-up companies can use Facebook for awareness and publicity. Large companies can use Facebook to create brand advocacy and to launch new products and services. Facebook now has ads on the profile pages personally catered to the individual user’s likes and interests. Companies also create fan pages for people to “like.” This way companies can notify fans of news, updates and basically maintain interest in their companies products or services. But there’s a social networking site to fit almost any niche that a specific business is trying to market to.
The best thing about social media is it’s cheap and it’s fast. A video, article, post or tweet can go viral in a matter of minutes. The use of social media is especially useful with the younger generation. One-quarter on social network users are under 30.
Social media is perfect if you are aiming towards a younger audience. started with the younger generation, but it’s becoming more and more popular with the older generation. If a business wants to be successful with social media, it has to learn to connect with its audience and know how to effectively use social media to its benefit. You have to have a good understanding of who is using social media.
Types of Social Media Users
In order your to know your audience, you have to know the type of audience you are going after. Social media writing professionals name six different types of social media users.
- The Creator: creates social media, publishes blogs or Web pages, uploads original content
- The Critic: responds to content posted by others; posts reviews and ratings
- The Collector: organizes content for themselves or others
- The Joiner: joins multiple social networking sites
- The Spectator: reads or views content, but rarely leaves comments or posts
- The Inactive: is online but doesn’t participate in any social media exchange
Writing for Social Media
Using social media effectively for business takes a lot analytics and research. But the most important thing is you have to know how to write well. Writing for social media may seem easy and even juvenile—millions of teenagers do it every day—but that is what is makes it so difficult. The type of writing is so new that it’s not a skill easily learned. If you’re writing for a business, you have to use contemporary jargon to appeal to a specific, tech-saavy audience, but you also have to appear credible by appearing knowledgeable and free from error.
Once something is online it’s viewable by everyone to be tweeted, digged, or facebooked instantly. To prevent you from having to learn from trial and error, here are some tips to always follow when writing from social media. There is a certain writing style involved, but most importantly is how you write, what you write and where you write it.
How to Write for Social Media
The first thing you want to write about is the message you want to get across. Then you have to think about who you want to send the message to. From there, think about which avenue of social media will get you to that audience: Facebook? LinkedIn? Digg? Stumbleupon? Yahoo?
Once you have thought about that, then you can start to write. Think about exactly what you want to say. Then think of the most exciting, concise way to get your point across. From my research on social media, I have devised 10 of my best tips for writing social media.
Top Ten Tips
1. Stay informed about discussions about your company and respond appropriately. If something negative is said, respond as quickly and tactfully as possible. Try and calm the fire as quickly as you can.
2. Don’t sensor. The whole concept of social media is supposed to be free and transparent. People can tell if you’re being genuine or not with your response. Social media was created to be honest and open. (Herzog)
3. If people don’t like you or your company, there really isn’t much you can do to change their mind. Instead, focus on the fans and what they like and focus on sharing that information on social media networks. (Herzog)
4. Match social media to business goals. Just focus on what will benefit your company, not necessarily about being involved everywhere.
5. Write for your audience. Don’t dumb your content down, but write in a particular style and in a way that will connect with them. Carefully select words and phrases that your intended audience will immediately recognize.
6. Stay current and up to date. If it’s old news, don’t both posting. Social media is one of the quickest way information is spread these days. If it’s not new and exciting, people won’t pay attention to it.
7. Read over what you write before you post it. Think if what you wrote can be interpreted any other way. If you don’t catch it before you post, it’s too late. Social media is all about doing things immediately. But take time to go over what you write; even a simple typo can have serious impact on your credibility.
8. Write concisely. No one wants to read more than they have to. With twitter, you’re automatically limited to 140 characters, but you can still write concisely.
9. Write compelling content; it creates conversation. That’s really what you want with social media is people to be talking about your business. (Handley)
10. Which leads me to number 10...write in a way that will lead people to interact and respond. Nothing beats having a response from an actual customer. Not only does your audience trust customer responses more, but they relate to them as well.
Interview with Alison Herzog, Professional Social Media Writer
Alison Herzog is a social media marketing manager at Zion’s Bank. Prior to Zion’s she worked as a social media manager at Serious Eats, one of the top food blogs. She received an MBA from Brigham Young University with an emphasis in market ing in 2011.The first thing Alison told me was there is no such thing as an expert in social media marketing. Everything in the social media industry is changing so fast so there’s no way anyone could know everything.
I asked how she possibly tried to stay informed when there were always new ways of doing things. Her answer: social media. You can easily stay in contact with hundreds of other professionals. They follow each other, give recommendations and suggest articles and websites. There’s a constant communication about how to evolve with the ever-changing medium. But by doing what they do best, professional social media writers learn from each other.
But most importantly, Alison said it’s all about letting your personality come through your writing. She said “You have to be genuine; fake doesn’t fly”. People can tell if you’re being honest or not. What makes social media so great is that it is so transparent. But that makes it even more important for companies have to be careful how they handle their social media. They need to make sure that they don’t appear to censor because that disregards credibility. They also have to really think about what they’re writing and make sure that everything they write won’t be interpreted wrong. Anything written online is permanent.
Social media is tough because you have to be creative and have good writing skills, but you also have to be analytical and be able to interpret data about the social networking sites of your company. You also have to be the right fit for your company. You don’t need a cheerleader tweeting for an engineering firm.
Alison shared some characteristics a good social media writer should possess:
• Friendly and effervescent
• Easily relatable
• Willing to constantly learn new things
• Intelligent
• Genuine
• Good writing skills
Social Media Return On Investment (ROI)
The hardest thing about social media marketing is it’s hard to measure your success. Even if everything was written perfectly, and you wrote to your audience and used appropriate social media outlets, it’s hard to measure the impact your efforts had.
There are two different methods of measuring your ROI. You can measure qualitative response by number of posts, comments and connections made. Sometimes you can see a direct correlation between social media efforts and revenue or business.
Quantitative measures are more difficult. If your goal is SEO ranking, there are a few tools to help.
• AideRSS: shows social networking sharing statistics
• Google Analytics:analyzes blog traffic, keyword optimization and bookmarking, and number of new subscribers
• Xinu: shows a variety of statistics from SEO to social bookmarking.
Bernoff, Josh. Li, Charlene. (2008, April) Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Harvard Business Press.
2. Uhrmacher, Aaron. (2008, July 31) How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business. Mashable. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2008/07/31/measuring-social-media-roi-for-business/.
3. (2009, May 21) Social Networking, Science and Civil Liberties. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from: http://people-press.org/2009/05/21/section-10-social-networking-science-and-civil-liberties/
4. Meyerson, Mitch. (2010, June) Success Secrets of the Social Media Marketing Superstars. Entrepreneur Press.
5. Handley, Ann. (2011, June 20) 11 Rules of Compelling Content. Mastering Online Marketing. Retrieved from: http://www.socialmediamarketingsuperstars.com/
6. Chapman, Cameron. (2011). The History and Evolution of Social Media. Webdesigner Depot. Retrieved from http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/10/the-history-and-evolution-of-social-media/
7. Herzog, Alison. (2011, June). Personal Interview.
Great interview with an expert. I would be interested in learning more about Allison Herzog especially with her background working for Serious Eats which overlaps some of what I do. Thanks for the tips.
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