When your target market is on social media, they are not looking to be sold to: they are looking into what their family and friends are up to, who got fat from high school and to keep up with news…This means sales pitches are not welcome, so marketers are required ninja-like subtlety to breach their newsfeeds and steal some likes. Today, we are exploring the best practices for this kind of stealth social media copywriting.
Speak on a person-to-person level
Stop thinking of your social media as broadcast medium. Social needs to be social and to be social you need social etiquette. This involves looking at your market in the eye digitally. You can do this by speaking to your audience on a personal level, mirror their dialects or by describing events they can relate to (and often, laugh at!) This technique will help you slip peacefully into people’s social media mindset.
Watch the wordcount
As marketers, we can get used to padding out white papers or brochures with jargon that when we get to social media, our idle fingers can’t stop typing. People flick through social channels, so lengthy paragraphs can be a big commitment for quick scroll. Generally, as long as your company’s voice is clear, your copy can stay snappy.
Storytelling
Few blog posts draw me in more than those whose titles leave me hanging. “You won’t believe what this copywriting blog posts said next.” This is as humans like to know how things end, making storytelling an active practice when writing your social media posts that draw people in. Storytelling is all about making a potentially boring subjects more arty and interesting. In life, arty and interesting things produce emotional responses. In marketing, arty and interesting copy produces emotional responses that produce sales.
Be Mysterious
Social media copy needs to have a purpose, to lead a customer to an action; like a click through, or a share, or a like. Too often in social media marketers, we can be too quick to give too much away. Build up your
audience through multiple posts and remember not to tell them so much in the post that they lose all curiosity to click through. Also note: mystery is about being different, the best way to be different? Write differently to 99% of SMMs by saying goodbye to the words “valuable,””groundbreaking” and “buzz.”