4 Essential Social Media Copywriting Tips From Grammerly

For any organization using social media (buts bands and artists in particular) every post represents an opportunity to tell your story and engage with fans, with compelling content that is either amusing or engaging. Here we look at four tips for writing solid social media copy.

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Guest post by Taylor Price, content marketing manager at Grammerly. This article originally appeared on Eventbrite

Think about the last social media post you liked or commented on from a brand or event you follow. What compelled you to engage with that post? Was it because of an intriguing picture? A clever joke? Or was there some emotional hook that convinced you to take action?

As a content marketing manager at Grammarly, I think about what makes for great storytelling (social and otherwise) all the time. And after growing our Facebook following to over 7 million people, the team at Grammarly has learned a few things about writing effective social copy.

Here are the strategies we use on each platform to create better posts that boost engagement. 

There was a time when Grammarly tended to use one- or two-word captions on images posted to Facebook. Although we still occasionally do this, we’ve found that there’s more space to write on this channel than we originally thought.

The average length of our top posts on Facebook in 2018 is a whopping seven words. We also occasionally post compound sentences on this channel and use questions to encourage discussion.

How to make it work for your event:

• Use Facebook posts to build community and conversation
• Ask questions like “What are you most excited about at this year’s event?”
• Try different post lengths to see what works best with your audience

An example of an event that does it well:

Instagram: Use punchy copy to emphasize your photo

Brevity is the name of the game on Instagram since your photos should speak for themselves. For Grammarly, 60% of our top captions feature sentences of three words or less, and our top-performing post of 2018 featured a caption that simply said “Yes!” with a hashtag.

While you can use up to 30 hashtags per Instagram post, we tend to use either just one hashtag or between five and seven.

How to make it work for your event:

• Let powerful pictures from your last event do the talking
• Keep captions brief, like “Let’s go!” or “Counting down the days.”
• Play with the number of hashtags you use to find the right number

An example of an event doing it well:

LinkedIn: Share longer, more thoughtful content

We’ve consistently seen polished, professional content do well on LinkedIn, paired with longer captions that tell a story (of our top 10, six have two lines of copy or more). Most of our LinkedIn posts include links, although the occasional work-related meme can break through the link jungle.

How to make it work for your event:

• Post top industry news
• Share exciting announcements about your event
• Pull a quote from the article to accompany the link

An example of an event doing it well:

4. Twitter: Write posts in dialogue with other hashtags or memes

Twitter is the home of the in-tweet, text-based meme. These are often a bit longer, and require knowledge of both the meme and how it will apply to your event. We’ve used the “If you don’t love me at my ____, you don’t deserve me at my ____.” meme in the past, for example.

We’ve found that the most discoverable, successful hashtags on Twitter are timely. Our average hashtag length used in our top posts is 12 characters and our brand hashtag (#cleanwriting) is also this length.

How to make it work for your event:

• Insert yourself into the conversation by tweaking popular memes
• Comment on timely hashtags in a way that’s relevant for your event
• Connect with your audience on the emotion behind your post

An example of an event doing it well:

Cutting through the noise on social media

Want to make sure each post is written as well as it can be? You can use a free online grammar check on Grammarly’s website to proofread before you post.

Want more advice on turning your fans’ scrolling into sales? Discover how to drive ticket sales with crystal-clear copy in Storytelling Sells: Bring Your Event’s Copy to Life on Social Media.

Taylor Price is a Content Marketing Manager at Grammarly, the experts in elevated storytelling through crystal-clear copy. He's used his writing chops to grow their audience to more than 7 million followers on Facebook.