When there are over 200 social media platforms and your online contact list spans everyone from your mother-in-law to your CEO, how can you make sure that in the deafening chatter online, your voice stands out clearly but also appropriately?
Here are our top five tips to writing effectively across the platforms you use:
Be Authentic
One of the key factors in building an engaged audience or attracting and maintaining industry interest is to be authentically you. Fake behaviour is easily detected online and without context to statements such as body language and audible tone of voice, it can be easy to make mistakes.
Quite simply, it’s not just about what you write or how well you write it, it’s about how you – the person behind the words – come across. It’s important to think about your `voice` online and how it reflects who you are. Although you can change your `tone` according to the network you’re posting on – your style should remain consistent.
It can be tempting to look at other, popular networkers and wish to imitate their style and behaviour – but then you’d be selling yourself short. Instead look at how they’ve managed to communicate their personality in a few words and think about how you can then learn from that.
Be Friendly
The key to maximising personal social networks is engagement – talking to and with people – not just pushing out information. It’s a little like the difference between going to a party and introducing yourself to people over a drink versus walking in the door and shouting out random facts at the top of your voice. Which person would you rather talk to?
Also, if you want people to respond to you, then you need to think about how what you’re writing will make them want to respond. As well as posting interesting content, have you tried any of the following?
- Have you given them a call to action – `please RT`?
- Have you asked them their opinion – `what do you think of this post`?
- Have you asked their advice – `What’s the best social network`?
Be Sure of What You Want
With so many social networks out there, covering such a broad spectrum of interests, industries and information, it’s really important to consider the audience you are trying to reach with each platform. Not every network will be 100% relevant to you but if you know who you’re trying to reach, you stand a better chance of being able to communicate effectively with them.
Given that most people will be on main platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Viadeo as well as having a blog and possibly Google+ think carefully about the personal social networks you belong to and ensure you cover a broad spectrum that reflects your `real-life` networks too.
As the networks cover different audiences, by thinking carefully about who that audience is – colleagues, friends, family, industry peers, recruiters, thought leaders – you’ll then be able to tailor your content accordingly. It seems simple and it really is – if you know the audience you’re aiming for, then you’ll know what to write.
Even with a mixed audience eg: Twitter – it’s relatively straightforward to post appropriate material online and to have a good mix of the personal and professional. A good rule of thumb is that if you wouldn’t tell your mother, don’t post it!
Be Accurate
Don't be afraid of the red pen...
No one likes to see a post full of errors so be sure to use spell check before you press publish. Not sure if you mean its or it’s? Is it practise or practice? Always double check – there are plenty of online thesauri and dictionaries.
Equally – particularly on status updates – keep clear of clunky and awkward text speak and acronyms. Not only do they ruin the flow of your content, they also detract from the information you’re trying to put out there. Additionally, not everyone will know what the acronyms or text speak mean – remember that your audience is international and your first language may not be everyone’s first language.
Lastly, if you’ve used a link/text/image from someone else be sure to give them a mention too. This can be in the form of a link back on your blog site or a mention in your tweet eg: via/cc @viadeo. This will encourage traffic between your sites or twitter accounts but also is an effective way of building relationships across the web. After all people may well be crediting your content too!
Be Thoughtful
Think about what your audience really need to know and remember to be concise. What is the key information for your audience and have you communicated that effectively? On Twitter although there are 140 characters, you don’t need to always use all of them – and it also means that you leave space for others to RT and comment!
Think also about the time frame in which you are posting – has something big hit the news? When the newsfeeds are full of comments on a tragedy and your tweets are promoting a new business venture, you may find that your audience are not quite as receptive as you might have hoped.
A final few thoughts – think before you post your comment, tweet or blog post. Have you spell checked? Have you credited people? Is your information as up to date possible? Take a read through your content one final time and you should be good to go.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this blog post, please do feel free to share this across your networks and of course we’d very much love to hear your comments and thoughts on this post below!