📑🛜🖥️ how to write for social media 🖥️🛜📑

The latest in the How To Be A Creative™ series, we explore the world of writing (a la, copywriting) for brand social media.

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Here we are, at another How To Be A Creative™ entry — and I have to admit this one I am not excited about.

Why? Because it’s the closest to “my job” and, like all jobs, I hate it. The bulk of my income on this day and within this decade has been made by writing for social media, specifically within an agency setting where I worked as a copywriter and even led a team of copywriters. Now freelance, I have a handful of clients (But am always looking for more!!! In the hopes of finding steadier ones!!!! Hit me up if you need help!!!) who pay me to write anything from social copy to blog posts to decks to internal strategies to short fiction: if it’s with words, I can do it and I do do it.

But the bread and butter is social copy, items written for platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and more. Is it easy work? Kinda. But is it super tedious and a very specific expertise? Absolutely. Do I love it? No comment. But is it one of the things that I do that consistently brings in cash more than journalism? For sure.

So here we are, in the belly of the copy beast, which I am reluctantly sharing as this does feel like work. But I love you all! And I want everyone to be able to pursue their dreams of getting paid to be a creative and, for writers, that means getting paid to write! For context, as far as experience here: I’ve worked in social media in many ways for years and my copy claim to fame is defining YouTube’s social voice while also doing the same for brands like Amazon Music, Tidal, and more. Peruse my portfolio here, if you’re curious what this work “looks like.” When I first started working in this way, social was very different: I was doing “live Tweets” for America’s Got Talent, where jobs like social copywriting didn’t exist and you instead taught people on set how to use social media. It was a wild time but, hey, it was also nearly 2012 and people thought the world was going to end. Nothing and everything changes!

So onward we go: here are my tips for how to write for social media ⤵

Voice is important, but consistency is more important.

The starting point for “brand social” writing is creating a voice playbook, to define how a brand speaks while creating boundaries for do’s and don’ts. This is very important for huge brands and big teams, where multiple parties may be doing the writing. This is also necessary when selling the idea of how a social media presence will come across online, to get executives to “buy” into the idea (literally and figuratively). But is a playbook necessary for most brands? No. Why? Because often a single person is writing social copy and they are the voice. The key here is making sure all posts feel the same, carrying the same attitude, written gestures (a la, punctuation, slang, emojis, etc.) without it ever feeling too forced or processed: consistency ensures that a joke and a support note and a statement from an executive all fit together without anything feeling weird. Your copy should always have a similar texture but be flexible enough to take on new shapes via emotion and punctuation, all of which add nuance to the writing. If you — as the writer — need to hand off the job of writing to someone else, that’s when it’s really important to make a voice playbook so that others “know how to do what you do.” Your job is to then define the attitude and approach of writing for this brand into a page or two, ideally the shorter the better and including as many links to examples as possible.

Check your ego so you can edit yourself.

One thing about writers? They are awful editors of themselves. They think every word is precious and that what they’re doing is “art” no matter what said art is. Listen: it’s all shit when it comes to social writing. Remove the idea from your head that this is precious work because it’s the top reason why writers I’ve worked with failed at copywriting. Copywriting is about getting information out into the world in as quickly as possible, in as few words as possible. Your little flourishes and attempts to sound cool or relevant get in the way of information sharing — and mean you failed at your job. Save your writerly ego for your essay and let this writing be utilitarian.

Also: keep copy as short as possible, regardless of platform.