13 Social Media Copywriting Engagement Tips for Your Brand

Social media copywriting is a skill that requires a deep understanding of authentic personal interaction and conversational wit that can drive action.

Consumers will always choose brands that provide a meaningful social connection between the product and their needs. It’s literally embedded in the name itself – ‘social’ media.

In the same way, copywriting plays a key role in creating an effective social media strategy that puts customer satisfaction before product or service value first.

Even if you are the ‘best’ provider in the market, if you can’t establish an authentic connection with your audience then you’re just going to be another brand they’ll scroll past their feed.

As a social media management company, our proven copywriting tips for social media engagement can help you create copies that evoke actionable conversations online.

A quick detour on social media and SEO copywriting

Aside from exhibiting the traits of an expert copywriter, Let’s get this out of the way first - copywriting for social media is different from copywriting for SEO.

Although both disciplines share the common goal of creating persuasive copies that boost your leads and conversions, there's a distinct approach to keep in mind when you’re writing for either field.

The main difference is that the latter is more geared towards growing the quality and quantity of your organic traffic through engaging copies anchored on keyword research. These keywords are what your target audience usually types in search engines when looking for your services online.

Its primary focus is satisfying the search intent of both your customers and search bots.

Meanwhile, social media copywriting is focused mainly on garnering customer engagement to boost brand relevance and awareness through any of the following actions online:

• Shares or retweets
• Comments
• Likes
• Followers and audience growth
• Click-throughs
• Mentions (either tagged or untagged)
• Using branded hashtags

Yes, growing your following is important but a true measure of social media success is an engaged audience who cares about your brand. Remember the goal of engagement is to create a positive brand experience that nurtures your existing customer relationships and builds new meaningful ones with your leads.

Basically, if you take care of your online community chances are they’ll be the ones to propel you as the top-of-mind brand on social media.

Exciting, right? Now, let’s zero in on how you can improve your brand presence with these copywriting essentials that can boost your social media engagement on every channel.

Copywriting tips for better social media engagement

Brand engagement can be generated in the form of a captivating headline, an emotionally resonant caption, a witty one-liner, or even just simply asking a question.

There are countless ways your copies can create good and even bad engagement online but keeping these copywriting tips for social media in mind should help you lean towards a more positive brand experience instead.

1. Define your brand’s engagement goal

Copywriting, even writing in general, requires a specific objective before the first draft gets punched, hence, the role of outlines and strategies. Picking what brand engagement you want to achieve can help define how your copies will be positioned on social media.

Aside from the usual likes and shares, there are other engagement goals you can try. For example, if you want to garner customer response, perhaps a copy in the form of a question can help you achieve that goal.

Pro tip: Always align your social media engagement with the overall marketing objectives of your brand (awareness, acquisition, etc.)

2. Involve your readers in the conversation

In the same way that I’m talking to you right now, it’s essential that copywriting for social media be immersive and inclusive of your audience. Naturally, you’d pay more attention to a copy that is talking to you directly rather than something being discussed in the third person.

However, this isn’t always the case. Using the third person approach has its charms especially if you want to tell a narrative in your copies. However, make sure to relate that story back to your audience along the way.

3. Encourage audience engagement

Building up from the previous point on practicing a “YOU” approach, try to elicit a response in your copies and introduce verbs that can lead them to perform an action.

Screenshot from Sanicare Facebook page

Audience engagement can be applied both to your relevance by gathering customer feedback and responses or revenue by evoking your customers to purchase your products. For the former, you can try exploring copies like “Tell us your story” or “We want to hear your thoughts” while the latter can be done through sales verbs like “Get yours”, “Buy now”, “Stock up today”.

4. Be mindful of grammar and spell checks

Think you can spot the grammatical error in this picture?
It’s really a no-brainer to always have your copies reviewed first before the publish date. It can hurt your brand identity in the process if your copies don’t undergo quality assurance as 74% of online users pay attention to proper grammar and spelling.

5. Trigger emotional resonance in your copies

An important copywriting tip for social media is to focus your copies on what you can do for the audience rather than what you can provide. One way you can do this is by practicing the P-A-S (Problem-Agitate-Solution) approach in your copies since this framework helps you focus on audience pain points in relation to the service you provide.

By identifying this you can further agitate and expound the problem to the point that they need a solution for it which is what your brand possesses. You can practice finding out what these pain points are by doing social listening to gather better insights on audience perception.

6. Balance transactional and informational copies 

In a nutshell: Don’t overdo hard selling in your copies. Consumers are smart enough to sense authentic engagement and if they feel that your copies are always out for their wallet, you’ll lose them in no time.

If you don’t want your copies to sound like a door-to-door salesman you can simply add a call-to-action (CTA) that invites them to “Learn more” or  “Find out” about the product instead. This pushes the agenda that you are still a business but whose agenda on social media is more bent towards customer value.

7. Never forget your CTAs

Consequently, some brands commit the mistake of writing copies without directing what the customer should do after. Remember, you’re aiming for engagement and it works both ways for you and your customers.

Notice how Lazada Philippines concludes their copy with an “Add to cart now” CTA to direct users on what they should after viewing the featured product.

Always begin and conclude your copies with a CTA that tells readers what they can do after consuming your content.

8. Speak in the active voice always 

When copywriting for social media your tone should always be posed in the active voice. Always insert action words like “Get”, “Buy”, or “Check out” in your CTAs and take into account power keywords like superlatives (best, worst, least) when communicating brand value.

9. Tailor the brand tone specifically for your niche audience

Think about it this way, if you’re a baby food brand what should the tone of your copies be towards your target audience? Obviously, you’re not talking to businessmen but mothers, which is why you also have to maintain a unique brand voice in your copies.

This copywriting tip also takes into consideration if your target market is a low-awareness or high-awareness audience.

10. Mind the caption length

Another thing that sets social media copywriting apart from SEO is the brevity of captions you’ll use per platform. 8 out of 10 online users only read the headline which is why you have to always consider your choice of words.

But fair warning – clarity always beats persuasion. Make your copies understandable first before making them persuasive.

11. Pair visuals with relevant copy

You’re not just posting copies on social media, you’re also complementing the visual content of your brand. Roughly 60.8% of marketers agree that visual content is necessary for both search and social media.

Always make sure that the messaging of your copies is aligned with the intent of the image. At the very least, the caption should echo what the visual content is trying to communicate as well.

12. Trendjack your copies when you can

Motorcycle-hailing app AngkasPH is well-known for its witty posts and copies that trendjack on Philippine pop culture such as this social media post that piggybacked on the premiere of the Disney+ show The Mandalorian.

Becoming an effective copywriter means staying on top of the latest trends and current events. Circle back on creating resonant and relatable content for your viewers but also gauge if what you’re trendjacking is appropriate to your brand identity and copies.

13. Utilize hashtags wisely

Without the hashtag from NASA’s Twitter account, this tweet might be confusing but we see here that it is in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing while trendjacking World Emoji Day.

Hashtags can act as trademarks for your social media posts. You can also try to piggyback your copies to trending hashtags to generate more search visibility on social media. Just make sure to study the trend of the hashtag first, or else your copies might be associated with a negative campaign.

Key takeaways

Aside from the above-mentioned tips, when copywriting for social media keep in mind the following:

• Establish as a copywriter the main difference between social media copywriting and SEO copywriting. Remember, for the former, you’re writing to engage on the platform while the latter is focused more on satisfying customer search intent and SERP visibility.
• Align your copies with the brand engagement goal. Be mindful of the copywriting frameworks you use vis-a-vis your content’s intent. The copies and CTAs for an awareness campaign might be different from that of an acquisition campaign so it’s also essential to know which is which.
• Know when to use long-form or short-form copies. Since social media provides an instantaneous user experience you should be able to strike a balance between lengthy and brief copies based on your target audience’s behavior. That’s why social listening is important because it gives you essential customer insights that help you determine what type of copy works best for your followers.

Think we missed out on anything? If you want to know more about social media copywriting for engagement or just simply want to have a chat about any digital marketing-related matter, you can always drop us a line via Facebook, X, or LinkedIn.