For almost two decades already, social media have been gaining importance non-stop. What originally emerged as a tool for simple social contact recovery with long-lost friends, relatives, and other acquaintances, very soon discovered its vast potential as a very powerful marketing tool for individuals and businesses.
Linkedin and Facebook are, in fact, an electronic fair of a sort where employees meet their future employers, and companies attract their customers. The same is true for Instagram, Twitter, and other social media of your favor, although each has its unique features.
This is why it is crucial to master the art of how to
write as a guest blogger – and do it in a way as to attract many new customers to the business of interest. Here are some useful recommendations to consider if you want to learn how to do that more effectively and probably make a career out of it. After all, as last year’s
research by Brookings Institute revealed, many professions would soon become obsolete as a result of automation, and many new would emerge. However, as a career path, social media management is currently at the peak of popularity and isn’t losing its ground in the foreseeable future.
Important Things to Remember
- Make the first step.
Although copywriting’s central notion is familiar to almost everybody, its true meaning is far not obvious. It is not merely giving a description of your goods or services, but persuasive writing to transform you passive readers into active supporters – not haters. Not an easy task to apprehend now, is it? Not even a clue what to start with?
A common saying goes as follows: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Sometimes the most challenging thing is taking that first step. A common “nightmare” among many professional writers is sitting with a blank paper or a text file and not knowing what the first sentence should be.
Many of those struggling at the beginning subconsciously see these first phrases as the most critical sentence in the whole written piece of work they’re about to produce. This understanding frustrates them further, and that’s yet another common problem to deal with.
If you’re new to copywriting, let us suggest formulating your task’s primary goal and using it as a starting point instead – although you may as well find other useful methods of your own.
- Know Your Customer.
Social media platforms like Facebook are somewhat similar to a loud market, with many people chattering at once. In order to not spend your resources in vain but direct them at a receptive audience, you either have to cry out even louder (hardly an effective tactic!) or “hit” them with what really makes their hearts beat.
First of all, whom exactly are you addressing? In each company’s case, there may be dozens of different stakeholder groups to deal with: clients, vendors, investors, business partners. Then there are, of course, analysts, auditors, regulators – you name it. Although not each group will necessarily read your posts on social media, the idea is still the same: you’ll need to identify the target group and find a “key” to it.
This is why emotional connection plays such an important role here. A proper psychological approach has a great deal in that. Believe it or not, it has a significant part in almost every field, which explains such widespread popularity of psychological training of different sorts nowadays.
In order to truly get in touch with the target audience, competent copywriters should know who they are dealing with and what this particular audience requires as an entity: what content are they looking for to receive? This doesn’t necessarily require being a certified psychologist but implies at least a little research.
- Invest in Your Writing Skills.
Perfect grammar is an essential requisite, of course. Still, when it comes to social media marketing, a dedicated writer should keep in mind many important nuances, such as:
- Character limits for each particular social network;
- Primary purposes of each specific social network. What kind of people are you targeting, what are their interests, what do they invest their time at home, at work, during the daily commute, etc. Many other tiny but critical specific nuances Instagram and Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest all have, which will make them very different in many aspects;
- What hashtags it is better to use, what tone to stick to, and whether to add emotional dimension or not;
- What writing templates it is better to follow in each case.
The above list is far from being exhaustive, as there are much more things to remember.
Continuous professional development (CPD) is another vital thing. Although, not an official requirement as in the case with, for example, professional accountants (who have to take a certain amount of CPD points annually to keep their certificates and stay in the profession), copywriters – probably like all others – still need to maintain their awareness of what’s changing in their field and adapt correspondingly, either through online/corporate courses for professional copywriters or else. You can also enlist some of the
best proofreading services to help you with your copy.
- Stick to the plan.
Advertising your products with social media, if performed effectively, can quickly become the leading way to attract new clients, more so in the field of IT. But in order to be performed effectively, SMM has to remain consistent in following a clear strategy of content marketing. Otherwise, your business won’t be getting the full potential from what social media may offer.
What sort of plan – that will depend on each particular company and currently pursued strategy. Launching a new product line is one good example. In that case, you as a copywriter will probably be given a task to raise awareness of the product among existing customers, or on the contrary – to focus your attention on a different market segment, if the product is aimed at not the same type of clients.
Or consider dozens of other different tasks your company’s governance may have – finding new partners, M&A plans, hiring, restructuring, other important announcements, etc. As a marketer, all those things must be communicated to raise your audience’s awareness and win over their attention. Quite understandably, in each particular case, what you produce will also be very different.
From that follows the importance of communications as a type of “soft” skills of utmost importance in today’s business reality. As a copywriter, you have a task to bring the message to your company’s customers, and exactly what message it will be – that is up to the company’s governance to decide, giving you directions to follow. With that in mind, you’ll have to:
- Communicate with your managers and understand the task,
- Communicate the key message to your target audience,
- Read the results of the implemented marketing strategy and, again, communicate them to the company’s governance for it to see if course correction is needed,
- Choose your words carefully.
No matter how great the social network guest post is, it is worth nil unless it finds its way to top spots in results generated by web search engines. Please note that “choosing words” here implies quite a different meaning as compared to what we talked about earlier: it is not simply about formulating your thoughts and writing them down!
Search engine optimization is probably the main thing mastering which you are able to direct visitors’ flow to your website and stand out among the competitors. SEO is a comprehensive internal system of measures to raise the website’s position among all other results generated by web search engines, depending on certain inquiries by the ones who perform searching.
The efficient implementation of those measures can significantly increase your website’s attendance, thus expanding your customer base. That’s why capable SEO copywriters who produce copy not only do that with strictly defined criteria, taking into account various nuances like thematic citation index (TCI) or keyword density, are so valuable and highly paid nowadays.
- Put technologies to good use.
Although no computer will ever write a poem as good as a talented human will, AI-assisted copywriting is gaining momentum (although still a subject for speculations).
But AI and machine learning are not the only technological aspects to be used by professional social media copywriters. Grammar checking tools are an obvious example, but there is much more.
For instance, there are also such useful instruments as text randomizers. Although they have nothing to do with artificial intelligence, depending on the task to be completed, they may remarkably save your efforts in producing many similar texts for publication on several different social media networks.
In conclusion
As one can see, social media copywriting is far not only about writing texts and posting them on social media platforms, although this may be seen as its basis. Successful copywriting in today’s business world requires much more than impeccable texts with keywords and catchy phrases.
In order to really get paid for what you can do best, you’ll also have to master other related skills – like awareness of user experience, for instance, or – who would have thought! – even basics of psychology to establish a better rapport with your audience.
Marie Barnes is a journalist, freelance writer, and editor at
Studyscroll. She has worked for many major publications, but she also ambitiously pursues challenging freelance projects. Her love for traveling motivates her to explore the world. Marie wants to inspire people to follow their dreams by sharing her experiences online.
