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4 Worst Mistakes Creating Copy for Social Media

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I was speaking to an old mentor the other day, who reminded me of something fundamental. He recently had to let go of an employee that wasn’t meeting expectations. He didn’t go into much detail but said: “Sometimes people don’t do things wrong, but focus on the wrong things.”

I recently realized that this analogy is extremely relevant to social media marketing. The Content Marketing Institute found that 91% of content marketers have a poorly executed strategy and 85% fail to measure their ROI. This is evident in their haphazard approach to copywriting.

Many brands invest a lot of time and effort in their social media campaigns, but neglect some of the most important elements. They may spend hours looking for new angles and picking images but throw their copy together within a few minutes. Others don’t test their copy variations, so they don’t know what does and does not work.

Creating Content For Social Media

When you are creating a social media campaign, you need to craft your copy very carefully. Here are some tips to follow.

Relying on rules of thumb with your call-to-action

If you have read a lot of literature on conversion rate optimization, you will have heard that it is important to always place your call to action above the fold. While this view tends to be true more often than not, you can’t follow it religiously. In some cases, your content performs better when the call-to-action is placed below the fold. For example, one brand found that moving their CTA below the fold increased conversion rates by 304%.

In my own split-testing experiences, it can go either way with social media marketing as well. If you create a Facebook post with a call to action hitting below the “read more “button, it may still perform better.

Using technical educational terms rather than engaging words that elicit action

Technical report writing may have a place in your funnel, but it can’t be introduced when you first start engaging with customers on social media.

A few years ago, I worked with a client who had published an e-book on guest blogging. He tried using Facebook ads to reach his target audience but had a lot of difficulties driving conversions. So I took a look at his ads and saw why. Here’s an example of the headline of one of his ads.

“Buy our guest Blogging e-book”

He did a good job explaining what users could expect, but the ad was just extremely weak. With social media, you need to write very engaging ad copy to get people’s attention. It is a form of interruption marketing, so you need to grab their interest.

We tested some new variations of his headline copy, like the following:

“what’s wrong with your guest Blogging?”

The CTR This headline was 320% higher. If you run your own split-tests, you would probably find that engaging headlines have much higher CTRs and ROIs than more mundane ones.

The moral of the story: you need to engage your audience rather than just explain what they should expect.

Exaggerating your value proposition

Social media can be an excellent medium to sell high-quality goods and services. By all means, you should try to highlight the benefits of your solutions. However, you should never exaggerate or deceive your customers in any way.

Make bold but honest claims in all of your social media ads. Otherwise, you will burn your reputation and possibly even face retribution from the Federal Trade Commission.

Failing to cater your copy to different demographics

You will notice that I don’t share any hard formulas on copywriting here. Why? Frankly, there are no scripts that consistently work. The main reason is that every demographic responds to every copy variation differently.

Social media gives you the opportunity to Target different demographics. You need to keep this in mind while writing your copy. It is best to create several copy variations for every demographic that you try to reach.

HubSpot