Social media marketing is special. It’s unique because it is one of the few ways that marketers can accurately target populations based on their likelihood of wanting to buy specific products and services.
Data published by Statista suggests that almost half of the world’s population now use social media. That’s a market of over three billion potential buyers for businesses to penetrate.
But how can they cut through the noise and make it work? Part of the answer lies in copywriting for social media.
What Is a Social Media Copywriter?
A social media copywriter is someone who writes content for social media profiles typically belonging to businesses. It involves carefully crafting written content to increase brand exposure and increase sales of products and services.
A social media copywriting job is difficult because you need to match your tone to the business’s brand and its target market. You don’t get a lot of space to write, making the task of engaging and selling even harder.
Not to forget that you’ll need to be creative, have a funny sense of humour and possess technical knowledge of how social media platforms work.
How Do I Become a Social Media Copywriter?
There is no single route to becoming a social media copywriter. Most people doing these jobs today are copywriters but have trained to specialise in social media. Others work in digital marketing but have steered their careers towards social media marketing, including copywriting.
There are several online social media copywriting courses that will help. These will explain what makes great social media copy. And they will explain more complex processes you need to know, such as social media algorithms.
How Can I Improve My Social Media Content?
If you have already started social media copywriting but want to improve, continuing to enrol into online copywriting courses tailored to social media will be beneficial. You will also pick up useful tricks and information from social media marketing courses.
Check out my copywriting course online where I’ll show you how to create kick-ass written content for social media accounts.
Other ways to improve are by speaking with successful marketers and social media writers for their insights and tips. We have some fantastic power tips for social media copywriting right here.
Implement these straight away to improve your marketing game!
5 Power Tips for Copywriting in Social Media
1. Start Asking Questions
Social media posts can snowball when they receive more engagement. And one of the best ways to increase engagement from followers is to ask them direct questions.
Naturally, you need to make the questions relevant and targeted. One of the reasons that questions illicit engagement is because people naturally like to show off what they know – and they will reply.
This can serve as a great way to move your post up the social media rankings and even make it trend.
2. Jump on Trending Hashtags (and make links!)
Social media marketing isn’t just about starting conversations. It’s about joining them.
Look out for trending hashtags that your market is likely to be engaging with and join the conversation. Relevance is crucial. Don’t start joining conversations where your market isn’t looking.
When you do this, you need to connect the hashtag topic with one of your products or services. For example, a popular fried chicken restaurant tweeted that they order the hottest wings to remember what it felt like to sweat on a trending hashtag: #dayswithoutsex.
It’s cheeky, funny and it links to their product. It’s golden!
3. Benefit Before Feature
Does the product you need to promote have a revolutionary new feature? That’s fantastic but forget it. You only have so many characters on most social media platforms. And guess what? You shouldn’t be concentrating on the feature itself.
Sounds strange? Let’s explain.
Consumers buy products and services because of the benefits they bring. It is the benefit to their lives that stirs emotion and create impulse buying decisions – not the feature itself, even if the two are related.
Use your limited copywriting space to focus in on the benefits of products or services rather than their features.
4. The PAS Technique
This one is suitable for social media campaigns where you have a little more space to write. The PAS technique stands for Problem, Agitate and Solution. Your writing should present a common problem that your product or service can fix.
But before you introduce this solution, you must agitate your reader first. Focus on the problem more by highlighting the consequences of this problem. This will increase the emotion of the reader before they are introduced to your product.
5. Stick with the Classics
Social media copywriting may be a new ball game, but some of the old school writing techniques still work a treat. There are some buzz words you should be adding to your copy whenever the opportunity presents itself.
These words are things that push descriptions to the extreme, such as ‘best’ ‘worst’ or ‘freshest’. Other words not to neglect when possible include ‘free’ and ‘bonus’.
Do Social Media Copywriting Jobs Exist?
It used to be the case that social media copywriting was predominantly undertaken by social media marketers themselves. They would create the campaigns from scratch, including the content and then adjust them during their lifespan.
Yet, in recent years, businesses have come to realise the value in employing copywriters specifically for social media content. And thus, more jobs have been created that exclusively focus on copywriting on social media.
Plenty of marketing agencies employ people to work exclusively on social media copywriting. Or you could work freelance as a social media copywriter and work for multiple businesses each year.
Want to learn new creative and marketing skills with me? Check out upcoming courses on topics like SEO, content marketing, copywriting and podcasting.
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