All Posts, Content & Copywriting, Marketing, Social Media, Typography
Writing content for different platforms requires a varied approach for websites, social media platforms, and print collateral. It requires a certain level of skill to know the difference as well as what ways are most effective. What should remain constant however is that your content be reader-driven and “actionable” to keep readers engaged, educated (i.e. informed) and entertained.
Writing for Social Media
Set the Hook Quick -More concise writing in social media (SM) is the key. Most people are on the move while on SM platforms so it’s imperative that you set the content hook quick with strong points up front and in a pronounced way. There’s so much content out there so this a key way to stand out, engage and create a faithful reader. This ultimately affects the breadth of your audience and long-term followers.
The Risk Factor – Social Media social graces aren’t the same as traditional forums. So feel free to take a risk every now and again. If you have a quirky yet innovative way to capture an audience, SM platforms like Facebook & Google+ are the places to do it. Feel free to mix your SM writing with audio sound-bytes or other platforms like YouTube to really engage and entertain.
Writing for Websites
Standing Out – What ever the main point is of your content, it should be conveyed in a standout way that doesn’t require a lot of upfront reading or navigation. Using bold or differential typeface, different color fonts, graphs, images or infographics allows the reader to get the “gist” or the most important information in 1 minute or less. Make sure these standout points:
- include bold statements about your business;
- engages the audience visually; and
- encourages them to act.
Write Easily Scannable Content – Don’t expect people to pour over your every word on your website. Scannable content is engaging content that allows readers to understand the general basis sweepingly, at a glance. It is easier to read than word-for-word and it allows readers to easily digest the primary information nuggets.
Writing for Print Collateral
Be Promotional & Motivating – Most web and social media content has to appear more informational than promotional. Subtle promotional content requires a certain finesse and is not overly stated or extremely brazen. A great print piece conveys to your clients that you take pride in your business, products or services. Your print collateral should persuade prospects and inform them that you have something valuable to offer them. Ultimately it should showcase your talents and strengths while clearly motivating to purchase your product or service.
The Bigger Picture Copy – Print collateral does so much more than explain your product or services. The quality of our product should be exemplified in your content copy and the copy should reflect in-kind. To me, sloppy copy conveys sloppy business. Remember once in a prospective client’s hands, you have the chance to make not just a client out of them, but hopefully a long-term advertiser via word-of-mouth.
Tail End Tip: Make sure all your content flows smoothly to minimize boredom, confusion or frustration.
Marketing, Social Media
There is no denying that many people are using social media in one way or another. There’s probably thousands of people each day that are new to it too. There are so many networks to use, and each one gets updated or releases new features so often, that I dare to say that everyone end up learning something the more they use social media. Here at Design Theory, we know a lot, but we try never to say that we’re “Gurus” that know everything. It’s hard to know everything when things change so frequently.
Now we’re online almost 18 or more hours a day. Be it on our smart phones, laptops, tablets, and desktops. One way or another we’re online and engaging our audience, partners, and clients in some form or medium. It’s a lot of work and a lot of constant effort. For the average small business owner deciding whether or not to get into social media, our advice is usually the same:
“Either go all in, or don’t bother at all“
Harsh? Yea a little but the reason why is we hate to see failed attempts. It is very easy to get confused when you’re first starting out. And those little mistakes that may seem insignificant to you, may cost you your online reputation.
Incomplete Social Profile
This is totally a rookie mistake, but you’d be surprised how many social accounts we come across that are only partially filled out. Have you ever seen that big goose egg on Twitter for a person or business? They probably haven’t ventured into the profile settings to upload a cool head shot or picture of their store or logo to show that they’re actually a real account. Or on Linked In where someone may use a picture of a cat or cartoon character as their profile photo. Not only is that not appropriate for that social site because Linked In is considered more of a professional business networking site, it looks like you don’t take your professional profile seriously. Facebook allows you to input a lot of information for your Business Fan page, so take advantage of that. In a lot of cases a successful Facebook page will show up in a Google search way before your website does. So be sure to have your best foot forward with all of your information listed.
Dormant Accounts
These are social media accounts of people or businesses that at some point got started, then got bored, frustrated, or lost interest and stopped using their accounts. I’m sure some of those people thought they’d get back on the wagon once they found some more free time in their day, have an upcoming event or sale that they’ll want to promote in the future, or some reason or other. However valid the excuse may be, to a potential client and your audience it now looks like you don’t take your social account seriously. And in that microsecond you lose a potential ear for someone who was willing to pay attention and follow your brand.
Duplicate Updates & Posts on All Mediums
Speaking of multiple accounts, don’t make the mistake in posting the same posts or status updates across ALL of your social media accounts. Its tacky and lazy. Sure that sounds mean, but it’s true. Most people are members of more than two social media platforms and they’ll see your post on one network then see the same one on another network word for word. It looks like a robot may have posted it or you’re not really putting time to pay attention to the conversations and tones of each network individually. Point is you can’t mix coffee with juice then a slushy and dip your donut in it and expect everyone else is drinking and eating the same things you are at each table.
Failure to Respond
This one kind of falls under the dormant accounts but in some cases is a bit worse. Have you ever reached out to a fan or someone on a social network and never hear a response? Or have you read a post that was just posted in the last few minutes of you reading it, and you like it and reply, and you never hear a response to your reply? Yea those are bad. It looks like you’re just talking and could care less about listening. Which really defeats the purpose of being “social” on these networks. There’s some etiquette for each network on reasonable response times.
You Think It Shouldn’t Cost Much
I saved this one for last because it seems to always be the elephant in the room. To be a little transparent, we get a good amount of emails and phone calls requesting quotes on managing creating social media accounts for small businesses. I would say the number one hesitation for us seems to be price. Yet we’re not the cheapest business in our local market and certainly not online. To give you an idea of a median price for a full package for social media management and marketing for Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, YouTube, and Pinterest; you would be paying around $2,000 a month. This includes metrics, tracking, custom Facebook tabs and landing pages, Call to Action and ongoing marketing initiatives, and of course constant up to the minute engagement.
After reading all this, I’d love to hear your thoughts and even your own experiences. Lets start a dialog with other readers in the comments below.
All Posts, Marketing, Web Design, WordPress
Many more small businesses are waking up to the idea of blogging. This makes us at Design Theory pretty happy because we preach about the importance of a blog for our clients and partners. Though not all blogs are created equal, there are different platforms, designs, and purposes. Still each blog’s purpose is to capture an audience and keep them coming back for more week after week, post after post.
Idea 1: Make Your Blog Easy to Leave Comments
This one should be a no brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many blogs are out there that have great content, yet lack the ability for readers to post comments. There are so many plugins and applications that allow users to use many different social and popular mediums to easily submit a comment. A free and commonly used one is Gravatar. Receiving a comment on your post is one of the most gratifying moments of blogging. Good or bad, it’s still people taking time to speak out about your work. Be sure to promptly approve your comments and reply. Unapproved comments is a sure-fire way to show a reader you don’t care about what they have to say.
Idea 2: Make Your Blog Easy to Be Shared
It’s safe to say most blogs out there are using open sourced platforms like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla. So utilize the plugins available to allow your readers to quickly share. Most are pretty easy to install and configure. Since a lot of blog article titles get shared through social media be sure to choose some of the more popular ones in your settings. Some examples are TweetMeme, Shareaholic, Google+1, and the Facebook Like Button.
Idea 3: Write More Help Topics
A common misconception with business blogs is to use this as an advertising stream. That’s actually not a good way to use it. In fact you’ll want to write more posts that actually help your readers and less about your own services and products. More successful blogs out there are blogs that constantly offer quick tips on fixing, making, creating, and developing things. And if you can condense a long dissertation to some cliff notes and still offer a productive outcome, you’ll create a nice following.
Idea 4: Get The Word Out
If no one knows about your blog, then no one reads your blog. An easy way to start promoting your blog is with your friends and family. Get them to read it to find errors and offer suggestions. For them that may be enough to get them to read it to try to tell you all you’re doing wrong. Its better coming from them than strangers. Then use social media like Twitter and a Facebook Fan page to further spread your great articles. Install some SEO plugins to help optimize your content for Google too. Include tags in your posts to help with indexing. Lastly, sign up with directory sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and submit your articles to them.
Idea 5: End With A Call To Action
Sometimes finishing your post is harder than starting. How to leave or Segway from your final points without sounding redundant. Try ending off with asking your readers to perform an action. Encourage them to comment their own points, a controversial rebuttal, a quick assignment that they can perform on their own for their own gains or improvement. This is also a great place to plug your service to help wrap up all that you talked about while offering your reader a time-saving deal or money-saving opportunity.
All Posts, Social Media
For those of you who question the validity of Twitter in business, I’m here to tell you to stop. Twitter, much like other mediums of social media, can affect your bottom line if you know how to use it. There is no one tactic to fit all, I can admit that, but that’s because each business is different and unique in its own way. Now lets talk about the numbers. You’ve seen some Twitter users with hundreds if not thousands of followers. From people you’ve never heard of to celebrities you have. However I’d like to expose a misconception in what novice people view in these numbers.
Follow for Follow: Now I haven’t been on Twitter since its original launch, but I have been around for a few years to see the evolution in its use. One of the things that annoy me and my team the most is people who follow only to get a follow in return. Oh they’re relentless too. I’ve even received followers that un-followed me months ago that tried to follow again to see if this time I’d bite. If I wasn’t in business to pay attention to who I follow and who follows our brand online they totally would have gotten me. So this thought that you must follow someone just because they’re following you is rubbish.
Follow Your Interests: I stopped short of saying “follow your heart” because that could easily lead you to trouble online. If you’re into woodworking, do a Twitter search for the keyword “woodworking” and see what pops up. Aside from the Tweets look at who said what and how long ago. See if you can jump into the conversation by @ replying. If the conversation or dialogs are of interest to you, go ahead and hit that follow button. Again, don’t hit it with the intent of getting a follow in return. Hit it because you value what that person has to say about that subject.
Thousands of Follows: Yea this is all too common these days. Check the screenshot below. How can you have 3,800+ follows and following 3,800+ and you’ve only tweeted 36 times? No website listed, No real name, No location. Clearly you bought all of those follows, and more than likely have a bot scrounging the net to follow people automatically. Don’t believe the hype people. When you come across these types of profiles just leave them be. Chances are they’ll latch on for a few days and drop off when their program notices you haven’t followed back.
Celebrities: They have big numbers because of the obvious. However they also have influence. The influence is what I strive to teach our clients to regard as important. If some pro-basketball player like Dwayne Wade said he was going to be at a Miami local night club, there would be a huge buzz around Twitter because of all the people who follow him. They’d RT that message and relay it to their followers by the hundreds or thousands just because of who he is and how highly they regard what he says. So be your own rock-star or celebrity in your local market.
Understanding social influence is what will keep social media in check. If we all went with the mentality of follow one and follow all, our timelines would be saturated with crap and Twitter wouldn’t be as fun anymore. I also think that’s what makes it great because you actually choose your level of noise.
There are sites out there where you can actually see some true numbers about Twitter handles if you really want to investigate the influence of a user. Sites like Twitter Grader, Peer Index, SocialBro, and Klout do just that. What you want to focus on in your own tweets, is the engagement. For a business, you can’t just run out there promoting your products and sales all day and expect orders to flood your site (unless you’re selling $2.00 Jordan sneakers). But seriously, find people who are talking about your industry or products and talk with them. Answer some questions they may have regarding their needs. Be a positive influence. Through the courtship, you’ll establish a relationship. Offer more information by answering a question and insert a link to your website or blog post that talks more about your answer. Being a great source for answers or information is where the true value is. That’s what gets you more followers and RT (re-tweets).
Have any other real tips about Twitter, please share with us in the comments below.
Writing content for different platforms requires a varied approach for websites, social media platforms, and print collateral. It requires a certain level of skill to know the difference as well as what ways are most effective. What should remain constant however is that your content be reader-driven and “actionable” to keep readers engaged, educated (i.e. informed) and entertained. 
