Photo by Orli Yakuel

In the process of promoting and creating exposure for a blog, social media holds a very special and important place for any respectable blogger. Through it’s vast user base and notoriety, social media can easily catapult any obscure blog from anonymity to popularity. It’s also a great mean to generate fast traffic and thus revenue. For those of you who are unfamiliar with social media and the web 2.0 world, I wrote, a while back, a introduction to social media, explaining in detail what the whole phenomenon is all about, on what principles it works, why it’s such a cool place to be and how social media can help you. Now, however, it’s time to dwell upon the delicate subject of building social media friendly content, that is easy to read, promote and share.

The Title of The Post

First thing’s first, after you brain storm your idea, it’s important you come up with a representative title that does well to summarize your content, but at the same time entices users to read your blog post, or in the case of social media: click it. Do not underestimate the importance of a title, I sometimes spend as much as half an hour just thinking about a good post title, some go to further lengths; look at mainstream newspapers that even have specific people hired just to write titles. Here’s a few quick tips on how to write catchy headlines:

• Use superlatives and other praise like words in your titles. This means using words like “best,” “ultimate,” “top,” etc the technique has been around since the early days of the written media and is still speculated. This especially works best when building lists and tops; it’s generally proven when building lists that if you input the number of list items in the post title, then users will be more enticed to read it. I.e. “The best 27 ways to make money online”
• Summarize your content. Write a title that does as best as it can to describe your whole post, take the title of this post for instance. How to Write Social Media Friendly Posts, as you can see when reading this you’ll already have a fair idea on what this post will be about, you’ll know for certain I’ll be talking about “social media” and secondly you’ll certainly know I’m writing about the actual content part from “friendly posts”, notice the “how to” as well and you’ll believe this is tutorial.
• Be shocking with your titles. Controversy has been widely used around the world to create buzz and exposure, making little things seem big with just a few words. Same thing goes for blogs and when used properly, controversial and shocking headlines can bring in a lot of traffic, but inevitably a lot of critique as well.

Those are just a few major tips, I’ll be dwelling in deeper detail upon the subject in a future post soon. Oh, don’t forget about the SEO importance of titles, but that’s another story.

Making Your Post Noteworthy

I’ve told you how important social media is and how when used wisely it can skyrocket your business, but many overlook the fact that you have to work really hard for your posts to be picked up by social media networks, such as digg, stumbleupon, reddit etc. For your content to break through and succeed in the though world of social media, you should keep the following in mind:

• Well researched content. This especially goes for highly focused niche blogging and will most definitely be your biggest time killer. It can be a real pain, but if you don’t research your content, you won’t be able to provide your readers with remarkable content and will most likely get slapped by haters, for overlooking a certain aspect.
• Useful content. Well you can’t go about writing about anything and then submit it to social media websites, expecting to make it big. You have to put yourself into your visitors shoes, why would I read this? what will I learn from your post? who will this help me? These are all questions that you should ponder yourself, when writing any kind of posts.
• Original content. The question of unique content shouldn’t even be put, as it’s self explanatory you won’t get anywhere by copying someone else, however if you write about something never before talked about you’ll have a far greater chance of breaking into SM mainstream. But that’s not entirely necessary, you can write a post about something that’s been turned and twisted before countless times and still manage to succeed, as long as you provide a unique and personal point of view, that puts things into a new perspective.
• Lengthy posts. This is not something entirely necesary, I’ve seen popular posts on social media websites that became popular with just a picture and a small description caption, but the truth is that the majority of social media friendly is more lengthy (1000-1500 words), as a direct result to research. You won’t be able to provide people with the necessary amount of information with short articles, so it’s important you detail a bit more, not to much though, you don’t want to clutter your readers with unnecessary content. Many of you will probably react by telling me lengthy posts will cause people not to read it, because of lack of time or other reasons, but if you think about it, the readers that take the time to read and analyze your posts are worth the most. These are the people that will comment and subscribe to your feed.
• Flawless writing. I’ve mentioned above how people can get extremely iritated when they read something they feel is improperly researched, but wait till you see them when they read something misspelled or written bad from a grammatical point of view. Always proof read your post before hitting the publish button, at least twice and pay special attention to the manner you’ve written the title and the opening paragraph.
• Representative photos. Always look to use images to visually express your thoughts and post’s essence. They will serve two purposes, one they summarize your content and help your readers better understand your post and two it will catch their attention (SM users tend to be very picky) and incite them to stick around. Pay special attention to the process of picking proper matching photos.

Although you can make a excellent, well written, original and thoroughly researched post, chances are it won’t get picked by major social media websites, unless your work hard promoting the post as well. But don’t let that discourage you, keep in mind you won’t get anywhere without remarkable content, so even if your post won’t get popular, you’ll have the satisfaction of writing a quality post.

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The How to Write Social Media Friendly Posts by Tibi Puiu, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.