Welcome to Social Media

Writing Well for Social Media

May 30th, 2009

Lila Hanft

Each social medium has its own flavor. If the medium is the message, as McLuhan famously said, then here’s a corollary to his axiom: every social medium has unique formal factors that determine the length, depth and even the tone and style of any message it is used to convey.

To write well in social media, you must know your medium well and use it often, because every social medium forces certain limitations on the writer. The 140 character limit of twitter places an obvious formal constraint on the size of the message, but writers are equally (if not as visibly) constrained by, for example, the rules of netiquette that prevail in online communities or the tone of an established blog on which they’re guest-posting.

Set against the unique nature of each social medium, however, are three principles of good writing that apply across the spectrum of social media:

1. Make it brief
2. Be as clear as you possibly can
3. Be genuine and generous

Make it brief

Omit needless words.

—Strunk and White, The Elements of Style

Brevity is essential in any form of online writing, including social media. That’s because we read differently online.

Actually, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, we don’t really read at all. We scan, “picking out individual words and sentences” rather than reading the text word by word. (Nielsen, How Users Read on the Web)

Looking for information on an electronic screen, we tend to be “mission-driven.” Whether we’re scanning a news story online or checking email and twitter updates on a Blackberry, we’re scanning to find that bit of information that is relevant to us in that moment.

So any message sent via social media must not only be relevant to the reader, it must be immediately recognizable as relevant.

And the only way to do that is to keep it short and get right to the point, before the reader's rapidly scanning eyes flit away.

Revise, revise, revise

In brief, there’s only one way to write briefly. You revise. You restructure sentences, look for synonyms, or rescale the scope of your message.

As Dennis Roth has said, “If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought.”

As social media’s briefest medium, twitter is an excellent way to practice brevity, writes Mike Elgan in Put Your Writing on the Twitter Diet:

Twitter imposes a 140-character limit on posts (including spaces and punctuation). Nearly every user I've spoken to about using Twitter admits to constantly revising each post to squeeze it into 140 characters. The habit and skill of revising for brevity and clarity is one of the secrets to good writing.

If you use twitter regularly, however, you’ll discover some shortcuts for shortening your prose.

Shorten with shortcuts

The web offers some advice and tools for shortening your prose.

1. For phrases, look for substitutes.

Dan Santow of WordWise provides a list of common phrases that can easily be replaced by one word without loss of meaning. Some I’ve found useful are:

• at the present time: replace with now or currently
• for the purpose of: replace with for
• in order to: replace with to
• in spite of the fact that: replace with although or though
• with regard to: replace with about
• on an annual basis: replace with yearly
• at this point in time: replace with now
• a large majority: replace with most
• be in a position to: replace with to or can
• in the event that: replace with if

2. For shorter synonyms, look it up.

Thsrs (The Shorter Thesaurus) at is a nifty tool. Type in a word and it will give you back synonyms that are shorter, even if it's only by a character or two. It’s particularly useful for twitter, where every character counts.

3. If your message contains links, shorten their urls.

Depending on your purpose, links are an excellent way to give something of value to your reader and bolster your own credibility. Instead of including a long gobble-dee-gook url in your tweet, instant message, or Facebook wall post, use a url shortener like tinyurl or bit.ly.

4. In a pinch, use texting lingo and abbreviations.

Using the abbreviations popular in texting and IM can shorten your character count, but carries definite implications for the tone of your message. Using 2 (to, too), 4 (for) B4 (before) or B/C (because) isn’t likely to reveal anything more than your inability to shorten your prose through revision. Almost anything else, though, damages your image (unless the image you’re aiming for is “sex-starved teenager with sophomoric sense of humor”).

Achieve Clarity

Don’t Make Me Think!

—The title of a bestselling book about web design by Steve Krug.

Clarity is the quality of being clear or transparent. In writing, clarity simply means that there is nothing clouding your meaning, nothing that distracts the reader from your message.

Remember that any online communication—particularly short messages sent via social media—must not only be relevant, it must be immediately recognizable as relevant.

Your reader should be able to see at a glance that your message is relevant to them, without having to think about it.

Poor word choice, confusing syntax, grammatical mistakes and factual errors will cloud your message, making it less likely your reader will see the relevance of your message.

Review sentence structure and argument

At the level of the sentence, clarity can improved by:

• Being careful where you place subordinate clauses
• Avoiding multiple negatives
• Using the active voice
• Breaking long periodic sentences into shorter simpler ones
• Making sure your pronouns, nouns and verbs agree in gender, number, and case.
• Using the simplest words possible. Save your big vocabulary for another forum.
• Minimizing description and avoiding metaphor.

To promote clarity in a piece of writing as a whole:

• Know ahead of time what you want to say.
• Write out bullet points for yourself and stick to them.
• Give some thought to key words that your readers will find relevant. Use only those key words rather than watering the message down with synonyms.
• Be straightforward rather than cute or clever.

Organize your message visually

You can strengthen the overall clarity of your message by starting with what’s most important. Jonathan Dube, the publisher of CyberJournalist.net recommends leading with the most important information, as journalists do.

You can’t afford to bury the lead online because if you do, few readers will get to it. When writing online, it’s essential to tell the reader quickly what the story is about and why they should keep reading—or else they won’t.

—A Dozen Online Writing Tips

You can also make your message easier to read by providing visual signposts like bullet points and subheadings.

Along with writing short, easily digestible chunks of text, you should also make good use of boldface, lists and subheadlines. These elements help guide readers' eyes towards the most important content, and make it easier to absorb large content.

—Writing Online: Best Practices

Proofread

Accuracy really does count.

Typos and misspellings turn some readers off immediately and damage your credibility with other readers who expect you to sound as if you know what you're talking about.

Make no mistake: everyone's writing contains errors sometimes, even that of English professors and famous authors. That's why copyeditors can make their living looking for mistakes.

So before you hit send, take a moment to look at your message with fresh eyes. If it's an especially important message — a tweet or posting about your new online venture, say — have someone else look at it. Or copy and paste it into a wordprocessing program with spellcheck.

There are some classic errors of usage that, for whatever reason, really annoy people. Confusing “your” with “you’re,” “its” with “it’s” or “there” with “their” really pushes some people's buttons. If you fear you may misuse similar-sounding words or homonyms, consult Brian Clark’s cleverly-named post, The Inigo Montoya Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words.

Be genuine and generous

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

—William Zinsser

Unlike most other forms of online writing and electronic communication, social media is concerned first and foremost with people. Social media's primary function is to encourage like-minded people to make connections, hold open conversations, and participate in group projects and crowd-sourcing.

To write well for social media, your writing must convey the genuine desire to connect with people. Especially, says Dave Walker, if your primary motive for using social media is marketing:

Be genuine in your desire to talk to people.

Social media is social. You need to start, join and participate in conversations. Marketing is about talking at people; social media is about talking with people.

—The One and Only Rule for Social Media Marketing

Your willingness to connect with other people must be conveyed in whatever you write in social media.

Keep your audience in mind, more closely, more intimately, than you normally would as a writer. Consider what you have or know that your readers could use and lay it out there in the most accessible, welcoming words you can think of. In other words, saturate your writing with what William Zinsser calls “humanity,” Walker calls genuineness, and I’m calling “generosity.”

In its best application, social media is the equivalent of an outstretched hand, an open invitation to start or deepen a relationship.

It really works, too. Let's say you and I are strangers with mutual interests (we live in Cleveland; we both have small children; or we both blog), I can start to follow you on twitter. One day I reply directly to one of your tweets, you reply back, and after a few exchanges, you decide to follow me on twitter.

I send out a tweet about a new post on my blog. You click on the link I've included in my tweet, and read the blog post, leaving a comment. I go to your blog in return and like what I read. You friend me on Facebook, or I connect to you on LinkedIn and we find we have mutual friends. Or I discover that you're also a musician, and get to know a different side of you when I visit your band's page on MySpace.

Or perhaps one day I read a blog post of yours on, say, a new fair pay law proposed in Congress and I've also just read a post by another blogger about the same topic but from a different perspective. I tweet each of you the urls to one another's posts. Next thing you know, we've started a twitter conversation and assigned it a hashtag, and now dozens of other people are contributing to the conversation we started about the proposed law. I start to follow a few of those new people on twitter and discover one of them lives in Cleveland, or has small children...

There's tremendous potential for connecting, sharing knowledge and building communities via social media. All you need are the right words to start.

Further reading:

• The Unexpected Trap of Writing for Social Media
• Writing Online: Best Practices
• How Users Read on the Web
• Writing for the Web
• How to Ask Effective Questions on Twitter
• Do you Converse or Broadcast? How to Build (or Kill) Relationships on Twitter

Lila Hanft has a Ph.D. in English and three masters degrees in the humanities, fine arts and social sciences. She has worked as a journalist, a psychotherapist, and an English professor. She taught writing, literature, film and women's studies classes at the college level for 14 years, until the early 1990s when she fell in love with the internet and never wanted to work anywhere else. She has been a content producer for MomsOnline on Oxygen.com; the senior writer at AGInteractive for the AmericanGreetings.com, eGreetings.com and BlueMountain.com websites; and a freelance consultant in email marketing, SEO, and content strategy. Recently laid off from the Cleveland Jewish News,she currently freelances as a writer and web consultant. She works from her ramshackle home on East Blvd. in the Cultural Gardens neighborhood of Cleveland, where she lives more or less harmoniously with her husband and two young sons.

Topics: Personal Best Practices

Tags: brevity, clarity, tone, voice, writing

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