Most SEO marketers utilize the network effects of social media to boost their site traffic and drive engagement for conversion. While the interactive aspect of social media can lead to high referral rates. Where many social media campaigns fall short is in the quality of their copies.
Writing copies that drive engagement is tough. The level of competition is high and developing brands can take a lot of time. With our 4 Tips on Writing Effective Social Copies, you’ll maximize the return on your efforts for expedited campaign results.

1. Write Copies to Your Platform

At a glance, character limits play a major role in how platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn display user content. Not only is accounting for the character limits of each platform a best practice, it will help better grasp how to write social media copies to the platform. Here is some basic information¹:

• Twitter has a strict limit of 140 characters, including links, images, tags and mentions.
• Facebook truncates posts over 400 characters with a limit of over 63,000.
• LinkedIn allows up to 700 characters.
• Google+ claims to have a limitless character count.

As a rule of thumb, the saying “keep it short and sweet” at below 100 characters on Twitter and 25 words on other platforms is the best approach to the length of your content. Copies that are too long tend to get overlooked in the highly saturated newsfeeds of these major platforms, limiting the potential for engagement.

2. Write for Action

The key to writing compelling social media copies is avoiding the passive voice. The passive voice downplays the impact of your social media copies with past participles denoting the action. Instead, use an active voice for a more straightforward way of illustrating actions. For example:

• Passive Voice: “Our software engineers were awarded 5 awards.”
• Active Voice: “Our software engineers won 5 awards.”

The active voice carries more power in its claim, giving the copy more authority than the passive voice.

3. Experiment with Purpose Categories

Experimenting with purpose categories will give insight on the type of content that receives the most response from your audience. Depending on the type of content found in your destination page, you may be restricted to a few categories. Overall, there are 5 categories of social media copies that receive high levels of engagement:

• Promotions: Offers a promotion, giveaways, contest, product offers or discounts.
• Advice: Offers tips & tricks to reach a desired outcome.
• Entertainment: Promotes humor or interest in a subject.
• Inspirational: Advocates an action or belief.
• Amazement: Inspires a sense of surprise.

When writing your social media copies, rotate between these categories for a better understanding of your audience. For example, in B2B industries, copies that hint advice or inspiration tend to receive high levels of engagement. Rotating through categories and destination pages will give you a clearer understanding of why.

4. Voice Is Consistent, Tone Is Flexible

The voice of your organization is one of the most important elements in your social media copy. It’s the most humanizing aspect of the copy that invites users to engage with the organization. Users are more likely to convert when the voice of your social media copy is consistent with the voice of the destination page.

Although voice should be consistent, the tone of the copy should fit its audience, situation, and social media channel. The best way to apply tone to voice is by outlining adjectives that describe how your organization should sound in the scenario.

For example, if you’re promoting a discount on LinkedIn, you’ll want to use a professional and strong tone. The scenario would be similar to having a sales representative promote a discount in front of a board of directors.
Writing effective social media copies that drive engagement for conversion can be challenging. But if you follow our 4 tips, you’ll maximize the return on your social media campaigns.

With a deep history of developing successful digital strategies, Strongpages has generated significant result for clients across all industries. Strongpages offers professional content development services that drive conversions and repeat business. To learn more about how content development services can lead to more revenue, fill out our form a content expert will contact you soon!

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¹ Kevan L. “Infographic”. buffersocial. https://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-length-social-media