Content Writing Is Hard, But You Can’t Not Do It
These days, it’s unlikely you’ll hear anything from a lead before they’ve checked out your website, social media sites, and maybe even subscribed to your email list. When your content writing is interesting, clear, and helpful, potential clients are much more likely to purchase that product or service, or at least remember it for more than a day.
What most people don’t think about when writing content for their business is that it can go way beyond just what’s on your website, but different platforms require different approaches to the same content.
People who use Twitter are engaging with different content than the ones who use Instagram. Successful content writing that actually piques interest and makes potential customers want to know more means you have to write for the platform.
So, let’s take some of our previous blogs and look at how to write content across platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, email, and your website.
Website
Let’s call this the starting point in your content writing journey. In a lot of cases, we like to look at it like your other content platforms are an extension of your website. Put your most in-depth content here. It’s where you need to present yourself and explain fully what you’re all about. Blogs, press releases, full articles, and pages all keep your site ranking well on Google and keep your clients updated and interested in what you’re doing.
For example:
What you’re reading right now. This blog is meant to fully explain the concept of content writing on multiple platforms, all contained in one post. Informational, helpful, or just engaging content will attract people to your website. Think about how your content can benefit someone who needs your services or product. We’ve discussed this in previous blogs, so we won’t go into more detail on it here.
Twitter is a tricky one. You have a limited amount of characters to get your message across. With this in mind, one of the best ways to use Twitter is by sharing one thing, like a blog post, multiple times. Hashtags are a huge part of Twitter as well, so you can take one blog and tag it different ways with different headlines over a few different tweets (but not all in a row).
Note: Twitter doesn’t count images against the character count anymore. It’s not a bad idea to throw one in there every once in a while, although Twitter is not designed specifically for images.
We wrote a blog post about time management for entrepreneurs a while back. Here’s how that post translated to Twitter.
A couple important content writing things to note here: Posting the link also creates a preview with the image we put in the post. Twitter limits your character count, so a short, snappy summary is necessary to get the potential reader interested. Twitter users generally don’t have a ton of patience when they’re scrolling through their feed.
Most people think “content” means “words”, but content is really anything you put online. Instagram is dominating everything these days, but it’s more about images than words when it comes to this platform. You do have more space to write a longer caption, though. Just make sure the caption is super relevant to the content of your post and the image is cohesive with the vibe you want for your feed and your blog post itself. Here’s the same blog, just on Instagram.
You could say that Facebook is the most chill platform to write for. You can pretty much say whatever you want with almost no length restrictions. Having said that, if you actually want people to read your Facebook posts, you need to be clear and concise. The algorithm is not in your favor if people don’t engage with your post. Gripping headlines and unique/engaging text are necessities.
A couple important content writing things to note here: 1) People are getting really sick of clickbait (i.e. “This Mom Went to the Store for Apples, You’ll be Shocked at What She Ended Up With”). 2) There is some research out there showing that posting your whole entire blog as one long Facebook post can pick up some pretty good traction. It’s not the norm, but to someone who doesn’t want to click around, having everything in the Facebook post can have it’s benefits. 3) Yes, this is the same caption we posted on Twitter. It did the job well, so remember to not overthink things when you don’t need to. You don’t need to prompt a click on anything, like you do for Instagram, because the link is right there.
Yes, it still exists and you should be using it. The trick, though, is creating content in your emails that people actually want to read. Otherwise you’re just spamming inboxes and not getting anything but annoyed people in return. The best email marketers know how to walk the line between short and sweet, and personal, engaging and informative.
The best way we can explain how we use copy in email is to subscribe to our newsletter. We keep it short and fun, with lots of different design elements and engaging content. It’ll give you an idea as to how we write for ourselves.
You can subscribe to The Howl Newsletter here (it’s actually super fun, even if you’re not in the marketing industry).
Conclusion
When it comes to content writing across all the many platforms you want to utilize to grow your biz, don’t be overwhelmed. Start with a blog, hash out all the details there and leave nothing behind (while being as concise as possible). From there, start breaking your content into micro-content that works well on the different social media sites. Content writing isn’t easy, but learning how to maximize it can go a long way.
