Twitter has emerged as a tour de force in the world of social media.
Short, succinct, and to the point, Twitter is a great place to share thoughts and build your brand, but how do you craft tweets that get attention?
My guide today is for people who want to learn how to write content for Twitter and use the social platform to build their brand and enjoy a wider reach (part of our new #howtowrite series!).
Why Use Twitter?
Today, Twitter is the platform that intersects with all of the various directions of technology and content. Designed to offer rapid-fire updates and live streaming news and videos, Twitter is a social platform designed to cater to mobile users (an estimated 80% of Twitter’s users are mobile), and enjoy the maximum level of reach. Today, there are 500 million tweets sent each day, and Twitter is doing things each day to adjust its upward mobility and cater even more effectively to changing markets.
Changes to the 140 Character Limit
While some Twitter users have always loved the 140-character limit, others view it as impossibly restrictive and frustrating, Fortunately, Twitter took the bull by the horns and make a large step earlier this year to make the 140-character limit a little more flexible for its users.
Under the new Twitter limit increases, things like the @name that’s commonly used in replying to a tweet, all media attachments, and the retweet button on your own Tweets will no longer count toward the character limit. What’s more, users will no longer have to implement the @name to reach a specific followers. Instead, all Tweets that begin with the @name convention will reach all followers.
How to Write Content for Twitter: Follow These 7 Rules
To write content for Twitter that your readers actually want to engage with, follow these simple rules:
1. Be engaging.
Twitter doesn’t allow a bunch of room for chatter, so it’s important to be engaging and let your content rest on that. Since tweets are only 140 characters (not counting the recent updates to that limit), you’ll need to pack all of your efforts into a small space.
The best bet to be engaging in this type of climate is to speak directly to your target audience. When your Tweets are highly customized and personalized, they’ll have an easier time capturing your readers’ attention and will survive Twitter’s inherently short content lifespan (which is only 18 minutes) a bit more effectively.
2. Add a shortened URL.
While a typical URL will eat up all of your Tweet space, a shortened URL is a great way to drive twitter followers back to your site. With this in mind, use a site like Bitly or Buffer to shorten URLs and add them to your tweets. This will allow you to enjoy a traffic boost without sacrificing much room in your tweet in the process.
3. Use trending hashtags.
Hashtags are the skeletal structure of Twitter. To be sure your tweet performs as well as possible add a hashtag. Bonus points if it is a trending hashtag. In addition to branding your tweet, hashtags can dramatically enhance your visibility on the network and can easily make it so that other Twitter users can find you and interact with your posted material.
4. Add an image.
There are not many places in the world wide web that images don’t help content, and Twitter is no exception. In fact, Buffer reports that simply adding an image to a Tweet boosts retweets by 35% To help your tweet perform well, add an image, video, or GIF to the content you post.
In addition to grabbing reader attention, this simple addition will also go a long way toward boosting your post’s engagement and helping it make its way around the web more efficiently.
5. Talk to people rather than at them.
Twitter is a highly personal platform, and your tone will go a long way toward defining whether your Tweets welcome your readers or alienate them. To keep your tone helpful and friendly, be sure to talk with people rather than talking at them. While it’s easy to feel like the people on Twitter are some distant crowd you’ll never meet, thinking of them as your friends and relatives can help you craft a voice that’s welcoming and exciting.
Struggling with how, exactly to do this? Don’t fear. Think about conducting your Twitter engagement just like you would a conversation with a friend. Focus on fostering a back-and-froth and developing topics, ideas, and conversational directions that are interesting to your readers. While this is a tiny step, making your Tweets more conversational and personal can truly have a massive impact on how effective your Twitter presence is at generating leads and promoting engagement.
6. Add your sense of humor to Tweets.
Humor is a powerful tool on Twitter, and it’s great for drawing people in from various parts of the web. As a general rule, though, you’ll just need to be sure that your humor is appropriate and professional enough that it can be passed along the web without harming your company or your brand.
For an example of a company that does this well, and always has, consider Innocent Drinks. The UK-based juice brand has virtually built its identity on a sly sense of humor, and Tweets like this one abound on the company’s Twitter profile:
ATTENTION EVERYONE: it’s cold. Best to wear everything you own and, if possible, find a bear to hold close to you for the next 5 months.
Twitter relies heavily on viral words and phrases that tell people what to do and when to do it. To use these in your Tweets, check out a list of the most-used viral words and phrases and incorporate them into your Tweets. While it may seem like a simple step, this can go a long way toward making your Twitter presence more engaging and compelling for your readers.
How to Write Content for Twitter: Simple Tips to Get You Started
Learning how to write content for Twitter is a process, but these simple tips are ideal for anyone who is new to the game. By being engaging, speaking directly to your readers, and making use of the viral nature of Twitter, it’s easy to craft a Twitter presence that improves your brand and helps your company stand out online.
Need social content that will knock your readers’ socks off? We do that! Our talented Social Media Experts are super creative, and in demand with our clientele. Check out our social media services!
They stand out as some of the most popular and widely used formats for content today.
But, here’s a million dollar question: how do you write them?
If you’ve ever wondered how to write content for a blog, you’re not alone.
While it’s true that writing blog content can be challenging, it doesn’t need to be, and my simple guide is here to help you learn the steps. Read on for tips on how to write content for a blog, another short how-to post in my #howtowrite series!
[bctt tweet=”Need some pointers on creating good blog posts? Here’s a nutshell guide on our own Write Blog, covering #howtowrite a blog. ” username=”ExpWriters”]
Why Blogs Matter
In addition to communicating valuable information to readers, blogs also serve important SEO purposes. When they’re well-written, they relate to Google and other search engines that a website is authoritative and relevant and that the writer well-versed on a given topic or in a given industry.
Additionally, blogs are a critical platform for any company that wants to build a well-rounded content strategy and are essential to companies striving to bond with their clients and showcase their brand voice.
Without a blog, it’s difficult to build up a consistent brand voice, and companies are finding that blog content consistently stands out as one of the most relevant and trustworthy sources of online content out there. To be exact, they’re the fifth most trusted source of online content among readers.
What’s more, blogging has the potential to have a massive impact on a company’s leads and engagement rates. The more blogs you publish, especially if they are SEO optimized with the right keywords, the more people will find their way to your site and its content. And if you’re writing your blogs well, they’ll want to stay, share, and download.
How to Write Content for a Blog: 6 Simple Tips to Start Using Now
If you want to learn how to write content for a blog, you’re in luck. These simple tips will help you get started.
1. First Things First: Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is essential to writing good blogs. If you’ve never built a target persona before, now is the time to do it. In addition to giving you an idea of who you’re speaking to and what they care about, a target persona will also serve the critical purpose of helping you get inside your readers’ heads and solve their most pressing problems for them.
When you understand your blog’s audience, everything else can flow naturally. It’s critical to remember who your audience is throughout the writing process, and keep them in mind as you work to craft content your readers can depend on.
2. Spend The Time to Craft Great Topics
Topics are the lifeblood of your blog, so it pays to come up with great ones. If you’re having a difficult time harvesting blog topics, turn to trusty sources like your website FAQ and Quora. These are often untapped gold mines of great ideas and outstanding information, so it pays to pay attention to them.
As you craft the topics for your blog, pay attention to which perform well and which don’t. This will give you a good idea of what you should be crafting going forward.
3. Make Your Hook Captivating
The hook, or the opening part of your article, is one of the most important components of all of your content. With this in mind, spend some time making sure the beginnings of your article are as good as possible.
They should be constructed to grab your reader’s attention and keep it. This means including relevant facts, stats, and information. It also means addressing the reader directly and ensuring that you know your audience well enough to know what will appeal to them.
4. Organize Your Blogs to Make Them More Readable
While many people bypass this detail, organizing and optimizing your blogs is essential.
To make your blog content as readable as possible, organize them into small, digestible chunks and ensure that you’re never presenting your readers with dense blocks of information. In addition to making your content more user-friendly, breaking it into approachable pieces will help to make it better for SEO.
Evergreen content will become the cornerstone of your blogging strategy, but only if you let it. Evergreen content is the type of content that users can visit at any time and count on it to be relevant. It’s also the kind of content that will earn you blog views long after the publish date of the content itself. With this in mind, publish evergreen content whenever possible on your blog. It will boost your content strategy, and your readers will thank you.
6. Keep Writing
Writing a blog can be tough, but it’s critical to keep going – even (and especially) when it gets hard. If blogging were easy, everyone would do it. Because it’s not, though, it’s up to you to find ways to make the blogging strategy work for you as much as possible.
When you run up on writer’s or topic blocks, talk to people in your community and look at blogs you admire. This simple strategy will help you stay on the bleeding edge of the industry, even when you face the challenges that all bloggers do.
Great Blog Content Starts Here
While it’s true that great blog content is hard to come by, it’s also true that you can learn to create it with a few simple steps. This guide gives you the framework you need to learn how to write content for a blog, and begin crafting your own outstanding blog content. Time to make your dream of becoming a successful blogger a reality!
By definition, a snippet is “a small piece” or “fragment”. Synonyms include “bit”, “scrap”, and “fragment.”
It’s a noun derived from the word “snippety.”
(Spelling the word will also earn you 11 points in the game of Scrabble.)
But when it comes to online searches, Google’s featured snippet box has changed the way the search engine displays results to users.
Anyone who has searched on Google lately will have noticed the box that comes up with a relevant answer to their search, especially if it’s a long-tail keyword phrase like “how to bake cookies” or “how many planets.”
To tantalize you a bit, here is some of our own content that ranks in the Snippets. First, our post in the key term “influential bloggers:”
I’ll disclose more on exactly how to optimize and prep your content to make it in the Snippets. Keep reading!
Google’s Featured Snippet Box: How Important Is It?
Snippets was released in 2014, after Google’s Knowledge Graph (2012) and Answer Box (2013) had already been designed. The two early models were sourced from Google’s database, while Snippets pulls results from third-party sources. Since 2014, Snippets has seen a fourfold rise in growth, with the biggest jump between 2015 and 2016.
The Featured Snippet box will contain a summary of the search results from a webpage, a link to the page, and the URL. According to Google, the purpose of the Featured Snippet is to draw a user’s attention to the answer. Web users may or may not have noticed that it’s been over two years since Google first launched Featured Snippets, and yet marketers are still passing them off as a novelty.
Some critics believe that Snippets only serve to provide a user with an answer, and are not effective in drawing them to a specific site. However, research from Search Engine Land found some results that may surprise the naysayers; after tracking a key page on a client’s site, which had been optimized to better match a searcher’s query, the found that:
Over 4 months, no significant changes came as a result of the optimizations
After 4 months, a Featured Snippet began showing for a particular keyword
The client saw a 516% increase in sessions and a 6% increase in click-through rate
Revenue from organic visitors landing on the page increased by 677%
What is Included in a Featured Snippet?
As Glenn Gabe highlights in his study (The Power of Google Featured Snippets 2016), Google’s Featured Snippets receive special SERP (search engine results pages) treatment and can serve to drive large amounts of traffic. In addition, they are designed to build credibility with users as they take the shape of:
Images
Charts
Text
Bullets
After asking a questions of Google, wouldn’t you be more drawn to click on the answer in the box with a colorful graphic, rather than the plain old text underneath?
How Does Google Pick Snippets?
Google is not manually picking which Snippet to feature; instead, the selection is based on an algorithm.
Any website is eligible to earn a Snippet, and there is no advantage for big companies versus lesser-known startups. Different experts will say that ranking position does play a role, while others have found that Google chooses Snippets from content all the way over on Page 2 of the search results.
This is GREAT news for us website owners!
As Larry Kim over at Moz found out when he pulled a report for his own website, Google pulled Snippets about 7 out of 10 times from as far back as Page 3, and at times, the source came from positions that went as low as 71. And to quote Kim, when it comes to Snippets, “You need them.”
Here’s How to Find Out if You Rank in the Snippets (Fast)
Step One: Get SEMrush! It’s my tool of choice for all things SEO analytics, as it is for many others.
Step Two: In SEMrush, once you have your domain added, navigate to Domain Analytics > Organic Research > Positions.
Step Three: In your organic search positions, sort by Include > SERP Feature > Featured Snippet.
Now, hit Apply, and wait for results to show. Test the results by plugging in the phrases on Google and seeing if your Snippets come up.
Not always are you still ranking for the snippet: a bigger site could be outranking you, as Content Marketing Institute did with us on “copywriter skills” (sniff, sniff).
How Do I Create “Snipp-able” Content? 3 Ways
As Glenn Gabe notes in his study, landing a Featured Snippet begins with covering your chosen topic as thoroughly and as clearly as possible. Include an eye-catching image near the answer, use bullets, and provide both the question and the answer on the page.
In addition, users may benefit from featuring content (such as a graph) in a format that is “snipp-able”. Besides displaying images, there are other ways to create content that will show in Google’s box:
1. Find out what users are asking, and then find the answer
General answers that can easily be found anywhere are not the best materials to include in a Snippet. For example, during a recent Google search of “How many presidents?”, the answers came up in standard list form.
When compared to a more specific search of “how to write a book,”, the first result in the Featured Snippet was from a website that instructs would-be authors on how to delve into writing.
2. Create a heading using search words
Notice in the above example that the author included the query “How to write a book” as the heading above the URL. Use a keyword or long-tail search query in the h1, h2, or h3 tag to increase relevancy and answer users’ questions.
3. Focus on longer, high quality keywords
SEMRush sampled 100,000 keywords and found that the average length of the keyword phrase with a Featured Snippet was 6. A keyword research tool (we love SEMrush and KWFinder) can help in this area.
4. Provide concise answers
Ideally, answers to questions should be between 54 and 58 words long. These can be in paragraph form, bulleted, or numbered, depending on what’s best. Hubspot also recommends running an audit of the keywords that are ranking within your current SEO campaign to see how many come up as question-based searches.
Everyone Wants to be a Zero
In the case of Featured Snippets, everyone wants to come in at “zero place” and have their content be front and center in Google search results. With a dedicated focus on relevant questions, an effective headline, high quality keywords, and concise answers, your content is more likely to show up at the top of the search. The box will draw them in, but the relevant answers to the questions will make them stay.
Whether you are currently in place zero or place 3, always remember that step one is to offer great content. At Express Writers, we provide the content you need to make an impact and leave an impression. Connect today to see how we can help you!
While content has many applications, ranging from social media to marketing and beyond, website content is by far one of the most common things that people want to learn how to write.
Designed to attract reader attention, provide value, and offer information, website content is the foundation of all content around the web, and it’s essential to know how to write content for a website in a fast, effective, and compelling way.
To be as useful and impactful as possible, website content can’t be rushed, sloppy, or completed with only a half-hearted effort. Instead, it needs to shine with relevance and value.
Here’s everything you need to do to learn how to write content for a website, and distinguish yourself from the crowd, in a nutshell guide in my #howtowrite series.
Focus on Value First – Always
Think, for a moment, about why people interact with website content.
They’re coming to a website to find out something about a company, a product, or a service. Maybe they’re a new customer looking to learn more about what a company provides. Maybe they heard about a cool new product and wanted to learn more for themselves.
Maybe they’re looking for a specific product and they want to do their research before they commit to buying. No matter what the case may be, website content is an essential vehicle for value and relevance, and it’s critical to provide this accordingly to customers.
With this in mind, website content must feature a few elements that are different and more pronounced than other types of content.
For example, it’s got to be more in-depth than social content, more professional than some blog content, and more personal than most marketing material out there.
To put it another way, people want to learn about your company, your brand and your mission through your written material, and it’s the job of website content job to do just that.
How to Write Content for a Website: 7 Steps to Compelling Material
If you’re setting out to write website content, but you’re not sure where to begin, start with these tips:
1. Be original.
When we say “original,” here, we mean it in both senses of the word.
On one hand, the content you publish on your website should be original in that it doesn’t appear anywhere else on the web.
While this may sound like a simple concept, 29% of sites currently feature duplicate meta content, so it’s wise to pay special attention to the fact that everything on your site is original, and that you’re not lifting pieces from yourself or from anyone else.
Secondly, the content on your site should be original in that contains your unique brand voice, outlook, and mission. Again, people come to your site looking for relevance and information and the best way to provide them with this is to be as relevant as possible.
2. Create strong headlines.
If you didn’t know it by now, strong headlines are the center of all things content, even (and especially) on your website. While the purpose of headlines is indeed to drive interest, headlines are also a good place to think about how best to provide relevance and information.
Ideally, people should be able to visit your site, look at your headline, and understand what the purpose of a page is and what types of information they can expect to find there.
With this in mind, creating your best headlines will go a long way toward making your content more informative, and can help boost the engagement and conversion rates of your pages.
Looking at your competitors and using BuzzSumo to search most shared content topics in your industry is a great way to be inspired and start a list of fantastic topics.
3. Provide relevant links, prices, and information.
The more information on a website, the better. If you’re writing a pricing page, for example, input links to related services and provide your users with all of the information they may need to make smart decisions.
While some people believe that including things like pricing on websites isn’t a good idea, customers are often grateful to have as much information as possible, and this small step can go a long way toward boosting the functionality and relevance of your site.
We have a Transparent Pricing page on our website, which clients have always said they appreciate:
4. Seek to provide answers in your website content.
When you write social media or blog content, a part of the process is knowing your audience well enough to address their fears, concerns and priorities. With website content, knowing your target audience is equally important, only you have to know them well enough to anticipate their questions and answer them before the customers have a chance to ask themselves.
When you do this, it helps show your readers that you understand their issues and that you’re willing to take a step into their shoes. It’s also a great way to make your pages more engaging, actionable, and targeted.
5. Be accurate.
Everything featured on your website should be accurate and current. Pricing information, for example, should always be up-to-date. You shouldn’t feature outdated services or bygone facts on your website, and it’s absolutely essential to ensure that the information you do provide is as accurate and interesting as possible.
In addition to helping your readers connect on a deeper level with your material, this will also provide a better user experience and a more exciting website for them.
6. Add images and video to your website pages.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and visual enhancement can work wonders for your website. With this in mind, consider recording a short product video and placing it on your product page or enhancing your “bio” or “about us” sections with images of your team, your workspace, your products, and your past successes.
These things provide a personal touch to a website, and can go a long way toward making the process more exciting and relatable for your users.
7. Keep it current.
Google loves fresh content, and this is especially essential for your website. Be sure that you’re not incurring google penalties by keeping all of your name, address, and phone number information up-to-date. This will help you provide the best experience to your readers, and can go a long way toward helping you rank well, also.
Learn How to Write Content for a Website Today
Website content is the cornerstone of all online material.
To ensure that you’re off on a great start with your website content, simply follow the tips in our blog today. In addition to providing you with new approaches to crafting compelling website content, these approaches will also allow you to put your own spin on the writing process.
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Had enough yet? 😉
