Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter followers, your one tip of the day
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Feb 23, 2011
Online marketing throw out the rule books
Writing for online media basically throws the rules of any reputable writing school out the window. English class may have taught us to use complete sentences and correct grammar while business school taught us to use formal business language, but none of that advice is valid when it comes to online writing. Why? Well, online writing was developed by two groups of people: computer programmers and users. Neither are particularly interested in perfect prose. They demand language that serves a purpose and / or gets straight to the point.
Is twitter leading the way for online writing
Twitter is a perfect example of this. Twitter’s popularity stems for the fact that there is a limit of 140 characters to each tweet. This forces users to be both economical and creative.
This is a tweet from the New York Times Arts Section known as nytimesart on Twitter:
ArtsBeat: Governors Ball Music Festival Is Planned
http://nyti.ms/eU4bKm
That’s it. Short, sweet and to the point. Although not all tweets include a link, a vast number do as this is the way the site works to interactively spread news and share information.
Facebook is the same as Twitter
Posts on Facebook are of a similar nature. The character restriction is not as short, but the competition for attention is equally intense. It is one thing posting a comment on a personal page that is directed at family and friends. Of course that will be read by the relevant people.
But what about a business post? Well, the trick here is to maintain a sort of family and friends tone. Ask playful questions rather than making bold statements. Use links to other pages to illustrate points in the same way that you would do with a friend. Encourage users to be part of the site by posting informative and interesting posts.
How does LinkedIn sit for online writing
The tone of conversation on LinkedIn tends to be more formal but then many users have LinkedIn linked up to their Twitter accounts so their tweets go direct to the LinkedIn live feed. A double whammy. Creating content that can span across a number of social media is both time-efficient and social media savvy.
If you would like more information on writing for online media, contact SiliconCloud today.
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