You'd be surprised what content is
Charlotte Booth • 15 November 2022
Copywriting tips for social media
However, I am often surprised that when I speak to some small business owners, they comment they "don’t do much content writing" in their business as they don’t have a blog or a newsletter.
However, when we later connect on LinkedIn or Instagram I notice they are posting everyday – often with long-form posts.
Social media posts count 100% as content for your business.
And bearing this in mind, the same time and thought should be spent on getting the message, tone and spelling right, as you would a blog post or webpage, because every post reflects your brand.
I read an interesting post recently on LinkedIn where the author admitted that most of her social media posts have spelling mistakes and errors in them – she didn’t think it was a problem.
As a copywriter, and someone who works closely with small businesses on their marketing this was quite worrying. Well, more than that it made me twitch! Everything you put out under the umbrella of your company sends subliminal messages about your brand, attention to detail, ethos and practices to your readers. Surely if you know you make a lot of mistakes in your writing you should try to ensure they are minimalised. Not send out the message that quite frankly you couldn't give a crap.
You can minimalise errors either by hiring professional proofreading services like mine, or by simply running a spell checker over it or by reading it aloud to spot mistakes. Perhaps this will take a couple of extra minutes but it’s worth it in the long run.
The great thing about social media for your business is the informal nature of it, the fact that you can be yourself, speak in a very down to earth way and use colloquial rather than grammatically correct English.
In fact, this is what social media is about – being you so people can decide if they want to do business with you.
However, this doesn’t mean good spelling and a suitable message should be overlooked. This is just as important as ensuring your blog or your website is as perfect as you can get it. Especially as most social media posts are there forever.
So, when writing social media posts for your business, remember they are just as important a marketing tool as your website, newsletter and blog and therefore need just as much time spending on them.
If you would like to have a chat about writing social media posts or even proofreading them get in touch
– I’m always happy to help.
Why do rage posts get lots of engagement? How do you channel that into everything you write?
There is nothing more amusing than checking out mediaeval artistic renditions of lions and other heraldic creatures. These beasts, grimacing and gurning are a strange juxtaposition of human, animal and demon and as far from the cute image of Alex from the Madagascar franchise or in fact a real lion as you could possibly get. There are three main reasons mediaeval lions are so ‘bad’ and un-representational; The artists were following a very tight brief. Some of the artists may never have seen a lion, and were following the descriptions they were given. These lions were representing heraldic principals of bravery, nobility and authority; all very human characteristics. When viewed through this lens it becomes more understandable why they look the way they do, but they are still ‘not right’ and not a great tool for learning about lions. Generative AI is very similar to an uninformed but talented mediaeval artist. There is a element of intelligence but at the end of the day it is following a brief, with no actual ‘knowledge’ of the thing it is producing. As an example, if you prompt your generative AI (ChatGPT and the like) to produce a blog for your new product or service, aimed at your ideal customer avatar you will in all likelihood get a mediaeval lion out the other end. Sort of recognisable, and sort of not. This is because AI doesn’t know what a customer is (ideal or otherwise), has no idea what your product or service is and does, and has no true understanding of how this service or product will serve your ideal customer and their needs. Of course, AI is pulling all the information available from the internet to help with its answer but there is no understanding there. There is no determining fact from falsehoods or even which websites are trustworthy and which are not. So, it skims the internet and puts together content which suits the brief as it understands it. This is then when the actual work should start as this content shouldn’t be used in the raw. It should be edited and tweaked by a human who DOES understand the brief, has been a customer (ideal or otherwise) and can imagine what your ideal customer will feel when using your product or services. We are in a world now, where we have generative AI promoting products and services to humans, when it has no concept of what a human is and how it thinks, meaning the marketing department are in fact more important than ever for ensuring content and copy is aimed at humans and human emotions. You could argue that the world would be a more entertaining place if there were more mediaeval lions in it, but it wouldn’t be a great environment for learning, or for basing purchasing decisions on. If you want to maintain the human element in your content, then I would love to help . Explain the brief, your CTA and your ideal client and I will know what I need to ask to get a clear idea before writing. Then you can rest assured your content was written by a human for a human and we can leave the mediaeval lions to the museums.
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