Writing for different platforms isn’t exactly easy.
A professional writer might be able to transition between writing for social media to a blog post to email more easily, but if you’re a small business owner doing it all yourself, it’s difficult to know what to do for each platform.
Let’s focus on writing for social media and email for now, since those are the ways you speak directly to your customers.
What is the best way to communicate on social media? What makes sense for email?
Thankfully, you don’t have to keep the channels completely separate, because they work together pretty well.
Social media is usually used for quick hits of information and spreads your company’s personality and awareness. Email is typically longer content that leads to conversions.
Let’s look at the writing techniques that you can use to succeed at both social media and email.
Tips for writing for email and social media
As a small business owner, any time you can combine tasks or “kill two birds with one stone” is the way you want to go because there’s a lot on your plate. Let’s look at several writing tips that will work for creating both email and social media content.
Brevity is the soul of wit – and social media
Space is limited on social media in a couple of ways.
Twitter literally limits your character options which forces you to edit your message until it fits.
But then there are attention span limits. No one scrolling social media wants to read your 2,000-word post. They just don’t.
You have to learn how to say your messages clearly but briefly to get your point across on social media, and that can be put to good use in email too.
You can tell a longer story in an email, but sometimes brevity will lead to more conversions. You don’t want people to open your email, see how long it is, and then click the delete button. They don’t have time to read an entire book, so you should keep it to a couple paragraphs with a photo and a clear CTA.
Use clear, direct language and take the opportunity to link out to longer content where necessary.
Know your audience
You need to know your customers better than anyone else. Know them like you know your family members. Be able to say what dramatic thing they did at Thanksgiving six years ago.
Or just if they engage more on social media or with email.
Maybe you have a segment of customers who love email, but they aren’t really on Twitter much and another segment who marks every email as read but they never close Twitter.
Try tweeting about your sales more to convert the Twitter lovers and segment your list to engage the email lovers.
Have fun and be yourself
Thanks, Mom.
Social media is where you show personality and can test new things. Try creative emoji use, experiment with hashtags, and let your personality shine through.
Social media posts don’t last long, which is why they’re a great medium for testing or gathering ideas. Ask your followers if they have any questions or if they want anything from you, and then you can expand on that in an email later.
Promote your newsletter on social and let people know you’ll be answering their questions there. That’s a good way to build your email list with followers who already like your brand.
Repurposed content is an underutilized tool
It would be ideal to have the time and resources to write original content every day, but that just isn’t the case for most business owners.
This is why repurposed content is so glorious. Social media posts don’t last long, so you can post and then re-post! Obviously, don’t spam your feed or else you’ll just lose followers.
But it’s not like you’re the Queen – you can re-wear an outfit and you can re-post social media posts.
Use your social media content in emails. Create a roundup of relevant previous content and keep promoting your best evergreen content.
Embrace the neverending cycle
Use your social media to build up your newsletter subscriber list by sharing links to your signup page.
Then use your newsletters to promote your social media by including social share links and links to your profiles.
It’s a neverending cycle that you can use to work in your favor.
Write, test, rinse, repeat
Ultimately, trial and error is the best way to figure out what content works best for your business on social media and in your emails.
Don’t be afraid of trying something new. You might fail.
But you’ll learn from the failure and try something else that they’ll like. That’s the beauty of email marketing and social media. It’s like your own personal research lab!
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that you need to be creating content, but you don’t have to constantly worry about creating The Most Perfect Content on the internet. Test new stuff. Embrace the failure and learn from it.
Try merging your social media and email marketing efforts to build up both channels.
And if you need help creating a digital marketing strategy that is customized to your business’ needs, give Digital Strike a holler. Our consultations are free.
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