Social Media Messaging Tips
What is Social Media Messaging?
Social media messaging refers to how you communicate with your social audience (think: followers, fans, customers and prospects).
There are two main elements of social media messaging:
- How to communicate your voice, values and insights to customers specific to your social presence
- How you deliver the messages above
Think about how you speak to customers can vary so much from channel to channel. Chances are there’s some overlap between your social followers, email list and organic traffic. That said, each of these audiences also has varying levels of awareness and familiarity with your brand.
Consider also that social media messaging is totally different from platform to platform. For example, Instagram and TikTok lend themselves to short-form, off-the-cuff communication that’s informal. This contrasts with “professional”digital channels like LinkedIn or communicating customer service via Twitter or Facebook.
Social media messaging vs. marketing messaging vs. brand voice
- Marketing messaging refers to how a brand communicates its mission and the value of its digital products to consumers on a larger scale.
- Brand voice refers to your personality as reflected by your tone and word choice (think: humorous, informal, formal and/or professional).
- Social media messaging takes the concepts above and packages them concisely into posts, captions, comments and DMs.
Marketers should put all of these under the microscope to make sure they’re sending the right signal to customers.
Factors to consider when creating social media messages:
Engagement, engagement, engagement
More than many forms of communication, they need to motivate the audience to engage with the content. Several strategies can encourage engagement, such as responding quickly to feedback from audience members, creating contests, and inviting the audience to respond to a question. Including photos and videos in social media posts substantially increases engagement, as does integrating marketing trending topics.
Consistency
The core message needs to be articulated across all social media digital platforms in a consistent way that conveys a unified voice. The message also needs to reflect the brand image; in other words, it should reinforce the brand “feel” or personality. One reason audiences disliked the message was because its suggestive tone was inconsistent with the company’s family-friendly marketing brand personality.
Concise writing
Similar to news writing, social media writing is straightforward. Because you’re competing against countless other messages in the social media sphere, you do not have much time and space to capture the audience’s attention. This is especially the case with Twitter, with its current 140-character limit. You have to think carefully not only about what the message will say but how to say it in a concise manner that has the intended effect.
Top Social Media Apps For Messaging
Due to the increase in users who prefer messaging apps, marketing business owners have devised other method of reaching clients and customers using social media apps for messaging.
Top social media apps used for messaging includes
- Facebook Messenger. Considered the biggest and the most commonly used messaging app, it works on almost all kinds of phone.
- WhatsApp for Business. It’s more professional compared to the regular WhatsApp; it allows customer support and sharing of updates on customer purchase
- Twitter. Twitter media covers more of news, entertainment, politics, etc. it’s an excellent platform for businesses.
- Instagram. Instagram is a video and picture sharing platform. Business owners can have an Instagram business account which comes with analytical tools that would keep your business running smoothly.
- Slack. Slack is a platform for team communication and work. With Slack, you would get more job done.