Guest Contributor Adela Belin is the Head of Digital Marketing at Writers Per Hour. She creates content surrounding marketing with a focus on social media and digital marketing.
You can be all sorts of fun and casual on social media but that has got nothing to do with using correct grammar, spelling and punctuation. Using poor grammar can tarnish your reputation and reflects badly on you.
Reading content that is full of typos and grammatical errors is frustrating. It does not let the reader concentrate on the key message and heavily impacts the reading experience. So, take those few extra minutes to read the caption out aloud and proofread it before you hit ‘publish’.
Stick to Active Voice
“You can avail exciting discounts today!” vs “Exciting discounts can be availed today!” – which caption speaks to you better? The first one, isn’t it?
This is why active voice should be preferred over passive voice because the former tends to be more powerful, persuasive and action-oriented. Passive voice on the other hand lacks that personalized touch which is extremely essential to arrest your reader’s attention and engage with them.
Incorporate Hashtags
Hashtags form an important element of social media captions, especially on Instagram and Twitter. While it’s important to incorporate hashtags, you need to be smart about it. Instead of using inconsequential hashtags or using an overdose of them, use hashtags that will make a difference to your posts and make them easily discoverable.
For example, if there is a hashtag that is trending such as #WorldHealthDay – use that in posts that are relevant to this hashtag. Similarly, you can also run a hashtag campaign and coin a branded one that your followers can use and carry forward. Prominent examples include Lays’ #DoUsAFlavor, KFC’s #NationalFriedChickenDay among others.
Adapt to Different Platforms
Does your social media content calendar feature the same captions for all the platforms your brand is present in? If yes, you’re doing it wrong.
Every social media platform is unique, and you need to adapt your captions to each of these platforms in order to be effective. What’s more, you might also be catering to different set of people on various platforms so doing a copy-paste job won’t do it. Yes, it’s more work but it’s definitely worth it!
Worried about your writing skills? You can always take help from expert writers to produce social media captions that are original, engaging, compelling and free of errors!