You have got your sleeves pulled up to write the coolest line ever for your next Facebook post, and although it won’t get you any writing awards, you are at least hoping for a few thousand likes and some hundred shares. That’s not too much to ask for, right?

It’s not but you have got your priorities all wrong. More important than the likes and shares is how you present your company to the public on Facebook. By this, I refer to your “brand voice”.

BRAND VOICE

Copywriters need to understand the target audience they are writing for and the conversion goals they are endeavoring to meet in order to figure out how they should write on a particular topic for a particular brand.

Consider this Groupon’s Editorial Manual (in fact, download it and keep it somewhere safe lest the one in this link gets removed). It talks about the strategies to achieve the Groupon Voice, and therefore has valuable copywriting insights. Like this one.

“Write as the omniscient narrator (3rd person). While using the 2nd person is sometimes unavoidable, the preferred voice you should aim for is the 3rd person, omniscient narrator. Selling points, information, and humor are all usually stronger in this voice.

Think of yourself as an objective, confident, albeit totally unqualified and frequently blatantly ignorant voice speaking at a panel you shouldn’t have been invited to.”

In short, use the voice, Luke (this one’s from Star Wars, copywriter edition).

Here are the two major elements for discovering your brand voice.

1. Understand your business niche.

For instance, Red Bull presents itself as an adventurous drink, and endeavors to connect itself with adventurous sports, culture and lifestyle.

So, adventure. That’s Redbull’s niche. What’s yours?

2. Understand your audience.

Newborn babies observe how their parents talk and, after around 8 months of meticulous research, they begin babbling the first few intelligent words– “mama”, “dada” or, allegedly, even order the father to take the “garbage out”.

Just like that, copywriters too have to dig through the smallest of details of their business target audience (age, preference, online/on-life habits), and then do the talking such that it will resonate with the audience.

Takeaway: Discover your brand voice and use it consistently in all your communication mediums.

Now that you have a brand voice, let’s talk about writing for Facebook.

Tip #1: Experiment. Approach the subject with different perspectives and tone. And choose the one that best delivers your brand message.

Facebook Post Example: SHORT POST

Article: How to double your traffic with infographics?

Facebook Post Samples:

We experimented with these four different tones. As we wrote on, we got better ideas and better ways to say it.

1. Tone: Insightful

From the delicate stage of infographic creation to its strategic marketing methods, we reveal the five killer steps that will double/treble your website traffic in no time.

#Howto #Crackitt #VisualMarketing

2. Tone: Instructive

Creating an awesome infographic is just the start. You have to market it properly to drive traffic and leads to your website. Here’s how you do it.

#Howto #Crackitt #VisualMarketing

3. Tone: Informative

A study said that infographics can grow your traffic by an average of 12% more. BUT we can tell you how to grow your traffic by 50% more. Dig in to learn the 5 stages of infographic marketing.

#Howto #Crackitt #VisualMarketing

4. Tone: Cool

Learn how infographics are born, how they grow up, and how they achieve immortality with this handy guide to the 5 stages of Infographic Marketing.

#Howto #Crackitt #VisualMarketing

Which one did we use?

Second Example: LONG POST

While short, one line post descriptions tend to be the standard on Facebook, know that you won’t be sued for writing a big paragraph. In fact, big paragraphs work great too.

Consider this.

You are scrolling down your newsfeed, and you pause at this interesting post.

It has this cool picture. And it’s from Harvard Business Review. Must be important, right?

Naturally, you will check out the picture, the headline of the featured article, and read the description too. And, though it did sound interesting (kudos to the HBR copywriter), I didn’t click the link to read the whole article. I just scrolled down to check the next post. Why?

Well, it’s the nature of the Facebook Newsfeed; we have so many posts to read every day that we only scroll through, checking one cat post after another.

So, in this case, writing a few more lines would make sense when you know that your target audience won’t necessarily be visiting your website to read the whole article.

The idea is to give your reader a summary of the whole article or rather speak of the important bits of information that you think would pique up their interest.

Here’s an example of a long post we used to feature one important article.

Article: How Your SaaS Business Can Benefit From Explainer Video?

Facebook Post Samples:

This article is targeted to SaaS business leaders, who tend to be an intellectual sort.  So we came up with the following two different post versions (we did write a few other versions too but then canceled them out).

1. Tone: Insightful

Explainer video is perfect for sales pitch and presentations. It not only explains your complex software in about 60-120 seconds but also does a good job of instilling trust and confidence in the viewer and persuades the prospects to sign up.

Dig in to find the 10 benefits SaaS companies can enjoy if they have an explainer video. Get yours when you are convinced.

2. Tone: Informative

Dropbox got $48,000,000 in extra revenue (Steve Jobs came knocking on their door). Crazy Egg began earning $21,000 extra income every month. Rypple also saw 20% conversion, and sold to Salesforce.

Email click-through rate increased by 200-300%. Business deals were won in 7 days. Complex software gestures explained in seconds.

All because of a short 1-2 minute explainer video, which they put up on their homepage and shared on sales pitches as a quick demonstration of their awesome software.

Which one did we use?

Note: Regarding long posts, Facebook allows only three short paragraphs to be seen. If you had written the fourth paragraph, it would have got hidden, and your reader will have to click the “See more” blue button to read it.

Conclusion

You might have thought that writing a Facebook post shouldn’t take more than a minute but when you represent a company and are writing to sell its brand message, you have to use a certain brand voice that appeals to your target audience.

And, once you have caught up with the brand voice, the next task is to experiment with words and come up with new and powerful ways of saying the same thing using different tones.

By: Sadbhav Shah

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