The Viral Social Media Content: 4 Writing Tips to Get it Right

The Viral Social Media Content: 4 Writing Tips to Get it Right

If you think writing social media posts is a trivial task, you ought to be living on another planet! Just when marketers believed they’d mastered the art of writing short, sassy, share-worthy snippets, a new trend favoring longer word counts (especially on Facebook) for an engaged user experience seems to be gaining ground. Keeping pace with the latest social media techniques can leave the best of marketers in a sweat.

Here we dole out our two cents on how to write effective social media content:

#1 Abandon ‘one size fits all’ – Know your platform first and then write accordingly

All social media channels are different and so are the preferences and needs of the audience who frequent them. Facebook is like a big family party complete with old friends, neighbours, and friends of friends. Twitter on the other hand, is like a loud party where whoever yells the hardest, wins the debate. Moreover, relationships on Twitter are impersonal. Linkedin is a professional setup where you get to establish your thought-leadership in a chosen domain. Snapchat users prefer short content that can be streamed live as Snapchat stories. There is no way that you can share the same content on different social media platform.

#2 Don’t toot your horn all the time – follow the ‘rule of thirds’

If you hard-sell your brand on social media, chances are you’ll encounter the infamous ‘banner blindness’ soon. Remember, social media is a place to humanize your brand, so follow the rule-of-thirds:

• Spend no more than a third of the time promoting your brand
• One-third of the time talking about relevant industry happenings – share, re-tweet, and comment on other people’s content – ask questions, opinions using engaging words such as ‘you, why, how, what’ etc.
• Spend a third of your time doing general tasks – answering people’s questions, updating information on your page, etc.

#3 Write for mobile to make your content ‘viral’

If your content isn’t mobile-friendly i.e. can’t be viewed or shared on mobile, you can never aim to make it viral – given that 71% of social media users access their favorite pages via smartphones. Besides being short and crisp, mobile-first social media content should be visual – think infographics, videos, charts, and images.  Optimization is a big part of any brand’s mobile marketing strategy and a big plus for SMBs that can challenge the online authority of large established brands with the right optimization. If you lack the in-house marketing muscle to crack into the mobile marketing world, outsource it to social media experts who can help you get the maximum bang for your buck.

#4 Clear expectations at the outset – refrain from abstract titles      

If your title doesn’t tell your readers what to expect from your post, chances are they will not click on it and hence it will go un-noticed and un-shared. Write simple, clear titles without giving away all the details. To make it more relevant, you can even try linking your headings to hard-hitting current affairs – from politics, sports, weather changes, etc. Also, using punctuation correctly can make more difference than you think as it has the power to make your content easier to read as well as share.

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