How to Create Social Media Content that Inspires Action

The following is an excerpt from “If a Tweet Falls in a Forest,” my section of Chapter 3: ACTIVATE in The Social CMO’s upcoming book.

Imagine this scenario …

You hear how one of your competitors is driving business through Twitter and want to see if you can achieve the same results. You open an account and become overwhelmed by Twitter’s language – a mix of symbols and slang that makes no sense to you.

After a while, you familiarize yourself with Twitter’s interface and grow excited by the possibility of getting your message out to a new audience. You post frequent tweets that ask your followers to check out your website, blog and latest promotions.

A few months go by, and nothing happens. No new leads. No sales. No amazing opportunities. You wonder if anyone noticed your efforts and reduce your time on the social networking site. You decide social media is a waste of your resources and go back to the old way of marketing your business.

Does this sound familiar?

If you’re like many marketers who experiment with social media, you may not understand how to develop messages that not only get noticed as they fall in the dense social media forest – but also get acted upon. Sysomos, a company that specializes in business intelligence for social media, conducted a study of Twitter retweets and replies. They determined that 71% of all tweets are ignored.

To succeed with social media, you must create messages that fall into the other 29% and inspire action. Let’s explore some methods to help you write content that resonates with your target audience, motivates them to take action and ensures your tweets are heard.

Make Your Calls to Action Social Media-Friendly

A major difference between writing direct marketing copy and writing for social media is the nature of your call to action. In direct marketing, most calls to action are designed to push leads further along the sales cycle. Since blatant selling doesn’t mesh with the conversational nature of social media, your calls to action should focus on building trust and sharing relevant information.

Here are 5 examples of calls to action for social media:

  • Ask your community to click a link to a blog post, video or other educational content.
  • Invite others to share their comments on a blog post.
  • Pose a question for your community to answer.
  • Encourage others to share your content with their friends.
  • Invite your community to download premium content.

Social media is often the start of a longer relationship that can lead to sales. Use these low-pressure, no-commitment calls to actions to start a conversation. Once potential customers grow to trust you, they will be more likely to take the relationship further by completing an opt-in form on your website, making direct contact with you or downloading a free trial of your product.

Stay tuned for The Social CMO’s upcoming book and especially my section of Chapter 3 ACTIVATE which shares many more ideas on how to create social media content that inspires action!

Rachel Foster

3 thoughts on “How to Create Social Media Content that Inspires Action

  1. I totally agree with you that social media is not a good area for hard selling. Social media is a space where companies can build relationships in some form with their public. Getting the public interested is the first big thing that someone can do in the social space. Once they are interested you can lead them back to your own website, which is a much better place for making the hard sales pitch.
    The trick then is what will work for your company to get them interested in the first place?

    Cheers,
    Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos

  2. Hi Sheldon,

    Thanks for the message. I just saw this today! The great thing about social media is that it doesn’t cost you much to experiment and see what works. You can also survey your audience to see what type of content they are interested in and then go from there.

    Cheers,
    Rachel

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