Copywriting for social media
Copy comes in many forms and is a way of both informing, educating and engaging people. It helps builds trusts and it helps potential purchasers in their decision-making process. To buy, or not to buy what your business is offering.
From website SEO, social media captions, press releases, brochures and advertising, good, well-targeted copy and a consistent tone of voice are a crucial part of brand strategy.
I recently completed a professional copywriting course as part of my continuous professional development for Chartered Institute of Marketing. It was a great refresher and aide-memoire to the formulas and techniques that transform good copy into great copy. I would highly recommend investing in a copywriting course if you are a business owner that writes their own copy, and you are not able to engage a professional copywriter.
Great copy can make a world of difference. It can turn a product into a brand, and a brand into a movement.
Joseph Sugarman
There is so much to share – the difference between hero and hygiene copy, how & when to write sales copy, thought leadership copy based around a ‘burning question’ and how to repurpose copy, but to start, a few practical tips on writing copy for social media.
Writing copy for Facebook
Whether you are a fan or not, Facebook is the most used social media platform globally. This year, there were 3.03bn active users worldwide. Having Facebook presence via a page will help your business gain exposure to potential customers and is useful for driving traffic to your website through links.
Facebook is a visual platform with a focus on content sharing so a good place to promote blog posts, reports, image and videos. Posts with 80 characters or less receive 66 percent higher engagement. Because Facebook cuts off longer posts with an ellipsis, encouraging readers to expand the entire message, shorter, engaging content that demands less of a reader will enjoy a higher engagement.
Keep is conversational and informal and limit the copy to 4 or 5 sentences. And don’t forget that Facebook posts will benefit from hashtags and the optimum number is 1 – 3.
Writing copy for LinkedIn
More than 810 million professionals use LinkedIn and as the user base grows it is more and more difficult to win organic attention, so posts must optimise messaging for quality and length. To maximize engagement and for best readability, the recommended length for LinkedIn posts is between 1,300 to 2,000 characters.
Best suited to businesses that have B2B content to share, it should offer quick payoff and every word count. Like Facebook, LinkedIn is a good place to promote blog posts, reports, images and videos, so long as they offer value to the reader. This is where shorter posts of between 150 and 300 characters can also be effective in capturing attention and encouraging interactions.
Longer form articles can also be a useful for thought leadership content. While there is no word count limit, the optimum copy length is 3 paragraphs. Hashtags help discoverability and should be limited to 3.
Writing copy for Twitter/X
A platform that connects people to share thoughts and opinion with a large audience. X business users do so for personal profile building, opinion & thought leadership, to follow other business leaders, brands, politicians and celebrities. It’s also a useful channel to stay up to date with news and current affairs.
A tweet is limited to 280 characters, so each word must count. Links, images, videos and polls can supplement a tweet. Tweets should be short and punchy. Tweets containing less than 100 characters receive 17 percent higher engagement than longer tweets. To get around the X word count you could combine a string of short tweets into a thread. This can work well if cleverly thought through - Julian Shapiro is a master at tweet threads.
Hashtags are a highly effective way of summarising content and can aid discoverability amongst users searching for a specific topic. Hashtags should be limited to 1 or 2.
Writing copy for Instagram
Primarily a photo and video sharing platform with a focus on visual content. Captions can be up to 2000 characters. With the post caption hidden below the first 3 lines (but the post caption is hidden after the first 3 lines, it’s recommended that the copy should lead with the call-to-action (CTA).
Hashtags and mentions customarily feature be lower down in the caption. Up to 30 hashtags can be added to a caption but it’s important not to hashtag stuff for the sake of it, Hashtags should be relevant and include a mixture of niche and more widely used hashtags. Clickable links to website or other content can be included in Instagram stories, but not in posts.
Consider social media writing as mini-blogging
Copywriting for social media is its own skill set. It’s a useful way to drive traffic to blog content, which can itself be repurposed later as social media content. Think of social media as a set of mini blogging tools, where well-crafted posts and captions can drive website traffic and improve domain authority.
Happy social media copywriting in 2024.
