Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: How is it going, everybody, Welcome to this
Skillshare class on copywriting tips for
beginners on social media. I am going to be your
Skillshare teacher today. My name is Ethan bridge. I am host of the social media
marketing school podcast, and I have been a
intent creator across various social media channels
for over two years now. And I think it's safe
to say after releasing over 250 podcasts episodes, coupled with thousands of
pieces of content across various social media
channels that I've learned a thing or
two along the way, copywriting being one of the most important
skills in that journey. Copywriting plays an
incredibly important role, whether it be in your
social media content, your script writing,
your blog posts, or even your copywriting for your website or
products and services. They can change the way
that your audience and potential clients
and customers view your service or your content and consequently increase more
engagement lead to more sales, you name it, there are a lesser of benefits for being
able to write copy. Well, you can Today's
Skillshare class. I wanted to share just a few of the copywriting
tips that I wish I knew very early
on in my journey, but I have picked up over the journey I've
been on and things that will truly benefit you
in your social media journey. So, without any further ado, let's head over into the first module and
start learning about some key copywriting tips that you should be implementing.
2. Copywriting Tip 1: People Care About What You Can Do For Them: The first tip that I
want to talk about is that nobody cares what you do, but everybody cares
what you do for them. Now this is something
that is incredibly, incredibly important
when you are writing copy for your
products or services. So let's just take an example of being a social media manager. What does a social media
manager actually do? Well, they create
content, they engage, they post the content, they come up with the social media marketing strategy
for their clients. They do lots of things, but these are features and this is a mistake
that a lot of people make when they are
writing the copy for that product or service. What they say is, Hey, I'm a social media manager. I will create you
seven posts a week. I will engage with
your audience. I will schedule that content and come up with your social
media marketing strategy. As great. Their features, not really telling people what
you can do for them. You need to sell on the
benefits of your service, not the features of it. When you sell based on features, you are going to compete solely on price because
you're going to be compared to others who also
sell based on features, but you need to flip it. What is that end outcome that you are actually
going to achieve? What are you going
to achieve for them? What you're going to achieve
for them is building a loyal fanbase that
these people are going to be able to leverage in order to sell their
products or services to your building a
community of loyal fans. You're going deeper than what the features are of your
product or service. Bringing out these
benefit that they can see that the can
be leveraged and see a potential return on their investment when you
display based on this benefit, when you display based on this
thing that you can do for them rather than what
you actually do, you're far more likely to make that product or
service seem more compelling and actually
make people want to buy it. So remember, everybody can
is what you do for them, but nobody's really going
to care about what you actually do when you're
writing your copy. Think about that. Think about how you can position your product
or service in a way that you highlight the benefits to your
audience members, which is going to make
them far more likely to be interested in
actually buying it.
3. Copywriting Tip 2: Replace Adjectives With Data: Now moving on to tip number
two and I'm actually going to share some exam
who then this one's help you gain a
greater understanding. But essentially what it
is that you need to start replacing your adjectives when you are writing
your copy with data in some of you might
be thinking what on earth does that even mean? But adjectives mean
things such as more or increase
or locked solve. So let's put these
into sentences now. Achieve more followers,
increase your conversions, or save lots of money. Yes, you're telling
people what you can do for them with
these adjectives. But there is a far
better way of actually positioning that wording
that's gonna make it sound far more compelling
to your audience members when you are trying to sell your product or service
on social media, or you were trying to
really hammer home that point when you are actually writing copy in your
social media content. So how can we change
those adjectives to actually make them seem
more compelling with data? Well, let's have a
look at a couple of examples that could
work very well. And these are gonna be
directly transformed from those examples that
I have just mentioned. So before, we had
achieve more followers. Now we have 80% follower growth. When you have that 80%, that gives a real
direct return value that people can expect to see. They're looking at that and
going, Hey, what am I at now? What's 80 per cent more of that? Whoa, that's actually
quite a lot. That's really interesting. But when you just said
achieve more followers, they're thinking, how many more, what does that even mean? It's not very specific, but 80 per cent, one is a high percentage
to actually provides more clarity onto what people
can expect on their return. So think about that. That's a great way of flipping
that sentence on its head. I'm making it seem
far more beneficial. Then we had increase
your conversions. Let's replace that with data. 150% more conversions. Now people are going okay, doubling and a half my potential
conversion percentage. Wow, this is something that I really need to
get on board with if I can pay this person
X amount of money to help me achieve a 150 per
cent more conversions. Of course I'm gonna go for it. But if you just said
increase your conversions, increase it by how much
nobody really knows. There's no specificity, there is no clarity behind
that statement. But as soon as you add that
data in people going, right, That's how much more I can achieve when I go with
this product or service. Or if you're looking
at your content, it could just be
a statistic that you're giving within that data. So a 150 per cent
more conversions, you might be teaching
people within that piece of content how to increase
their conversions. And you're not just saying, Oh, by doing this, you will
get more conversions. You can say on average, and relate it to an
experience you've had to measure the new
normal results from. This has helped me achieve an increased conversion
rate by 150 per cent. That's how you can relate it to your experiences rather
than just saying, Hey, I did this and then I
achieved more conversions. That's boring. It's not specific. People go and hey, okay, but you can do anything
possibly and achieve more. But how much more? How beneficial was
this actually to you? When you can actually
prove that with the data, make it specific. People are looking at
it and going, Okay. Now this is really interesting. I want to try this now. And then finally we had save lots of money. How much money? Lots as a term seems like
it's going to be a lot, but then you may only
offer a 10% discount. Let's look at it this way. On average, how much
would you want to save on your monthly
spend for your business? Lots to some people, as I said, could be 10%. Now let's add some data in. Save 20 to 30%. Now you're adding
that specificity and clarity and people
looking at and going, okay, this is something
I can really invest in. This is something I need. I love that for my business. I want to listen to this person. I want to consume this
piece of content. I want to buy this product or
service because I know that this direct benefit
is going to have this effect on my business, all my social media
strategy, you name it, whatever this piece of
data may apply to you. But this is why replacing your adjectives with data
is so, so important. Data really helps to amplify the potential of your
product or service. The potential of implementing the tips that you mentioned within your social
media content, which in turn builds trust with your audience
because you'll be in specific, you're telling them actually how much they're going to bend, benefit from it, or how much
they're gonna save or how much it's going to increase
their conversions. You name any of the
examples we gave. But being specific is building that trust because
you're not being vague. You're not just saying,
Hey, if you do this, you'll get that
nobody likes that. People like to know, people like to be understanding and know that you'll be in
transparent with them. If you can do that
by using data. Fantastic.
4. Copywriting Tip 3: Ensure Your Copywriting Is Scannable: Say now, the next
tip I wanted to talk about is ensuring that your copywriting is scanner
bull on social media, we need to understand and unsure many of you
already understand the attention spans are
incredibly, incredibly short. There is a plethora, there is tons, is thousands, hundreds of thousands of pieces of content for people
to scroll through. So why on earth should they consume yours or when
they stop consuming it? Why should their attention to be retained by your
piece of content? And one of the biggest
pet peeves of mine is when I'm scrolling
through a carousel, let's say on Instagram, and there is just
this block of text. A block of text that seems
like I'm reading a novel. If I wanted to go
and read a book, I would go and read a book. You need to ensure that
your copywriting is scannable so that people can read through that
piece of copyrighting, gauge whether they
actually wanted to consume and go back and
read the rest of it. Because the value that they consumed through actually
scanning it in the first place made them realize there's
definitely going to be something in here
that I'm actually going to be able to learn from. Let me go back and go
into that in more detail. I want you to read
these two examples. I'm going to plop up on
the screen in front of me. Pause this module right now. Read both, and then come back. You read both. You may have only read one
and I'm pretty sure I know which one you read
because it's scannable. I have presented that
piece of text in a way that you can look at it and scan through
the specific points, then go OK, now, that
was pretty valuable. Now I want to learn
more, go back into it in more detail and then you
see the value within it. I have still try to put value within that other
piece of text I've written, but it's far less
attractive to actually read because it is just that
one big block of text. And it proves my
point perfectly. A few tips when you are
writing your captions, your carousels, your
LinkedIn posts. This is something that
a lot of creators are actually taken and
implementing recently. You need to break up your
copy to make it easy to read. You can see how in the example that I made,
It's very scalable, but I understand
that you can't have different font sizes and captions or LinkedIn
posts, you name it, you can bold text
that's different, but you can't make
font size cities bigger like I've done
in the other posts. So what you need to do
to make your copywriting far easier to read is to
break it up line by line. Something unlike to domain Instagram Carousels
is I only have one sentence per slide the majority of the time because I know attention
spans are short. I want to keep people scrolling. And if they come
across too much texts like I gave him the example, they're going to
stop there, just go into the next, let's be honest. So I break it up into
manageable chunks because manageable chunks are far more satisfying and retain
the attention. But this works in LinkedIn
copy caption copy you name it because when people look
at LinkedIn posts and see that it's
broken up line by line. It looks far easy to read. It could be an
incredibly long posts, but because it's broken up
into manageable sections, people are going to
be far more like the end engaged when reading. Same thing goes
for your captions. So if you are writing
LinkedIn posts, captions, carousels, see if
you can do that because you want to retain the attention as
much as possible. You want it to be scalable. You want to keep people engaged. You don't want to put people
off by having huge chunks of text because nobody has the attention span
anymore on social media. So please take this
point into consideration and start implementing it
into your copywriting.
5. Copywriting Tip 4: Less Is More When Writing Titles: Next, I want to talk about your titles or the hooks
for your piece of content, depending on what platform
you are posting on. When you are writing your hook for your piece of
social media content, your hook for your
product or service, the hook for your video ad, you name it less, is more. And again, I want to show you two pretty good examples
of headlines or titles. But one in my opinion
is far, far better. So I'm going to highlight which ones the wrong one, which
one's the right one. Here we go. We had the wrong way and
we have the right way, the wrong way being, try this unknown
Instagram growth hack to get more followers. Now if I'm reading knife, I'm designing it on a carousel. It's a bit of a mouthful. There is a lot of that chunk
of text that we can break out and ensure that we can
just make it into a simpler, yet equally as effective
headline title hook. So what we're gonna do is
we're going to take this now and we're going to turn
it into a good example. Now, secret Instagram, growth hack has the same effectiveness. It provides the same value. People read both captions and
know what they're getting themselves in for when they are coming in to consume
that piece of content. But one is far shorter, easier to read, catchier, more intriguing
because you'll be able to design it
better because there's less words that you have
to organize on the page. Everything just
seems a bit better, but it provides the same
amount of value and gifts, the same effect of what
people are actually going to be consuming in
that piece of content. Both titles, I say again, are effective at telling the reader what they're
about to consume. However, the latter, the
right way is shorter. It grabs attention
quicker because there's less to read and
that word secret, people thinking all secret. That's something I
haven't heard before. Somebody who can tell
me something that is new and nobody else is going to know about.
It's intriguing. That being the fact that it's
intriguing, in my opinion, is far better than
the longer title that gives a bit
more information. But in reality is a bit longer, less intriguing because it's
more interesting to read. You name it. So think about it. When you are writing
your titles, write something out,
read it and think, how can I break this down? How can I make it shorter but still give across the same
point that I wanted to make and make it as intriguing as possible so that
my read is gonna go, hey, I want to know about this. And if it's an
Instagram carousel, slide onto the next slide, or if it's a blog post, I'll click through
and start reading it. Or if it's a hook for your
video or Instagram, Tiktok, start watching it so
they can understand what that secret Instagram
growth hack actually is.
6. Copywriting Tip 5: Start Thinking Call-To-Value: Now we're going to
start talking a little bit about call to action, something that people
would have at the end, the social media content, whether it be a
video or a carousel. The carousel being
the final slide, the video at the
end of the video or in the video description, or at the end of your caption, because you've kept people
engage full that time. And now you went to leverage that attention that
you've been able to retain throughout
your piece of content. And because you've
provided the value, you then want to
push that person in a direction to do something for you
wherever that be joined, a newsletter, join a community, sell your product or service. We listened to your
podcast, you name it. All of these different
possibilities that could benefit you because you
provided that value. You've got every right to us. So that's what a call to action is going to be able to do. You're calling the
individual to action, go and listen to my podcast. You name it. But I want you to flip
this on its head a little. We've talked all the time and you hear all the time
on social media. Call to action, call to
action, call to action. I want you to stop thinking
cool to action and start thinking CO2 value. Cool to value is far more promising for the
individual when they read it. Then a call to action
actually is because when people write their call
to actions, they go, hey, listen to my podcast, go and click the link in my
bio to buy this, you name it. What's significant them. They just know,
right? If they're gonna go and have
to buy something, they've got to hand over
their hard-earned money to get what you are
actually selling. Start thinking cool to value. Like with previous modules, I just want to give
you a couple of different examples the wrong
way first, sign up today. That's a common example
of what people use. Start your free trial. Sounds disgusting or subscribe. Now it's very common one when
it comes to a newsletter, podcast, YouTube
channel, you name it. But now I want to
change these up a little, make them more of a, a lot of value rather
than sign up today, if you had a website
building service, you can have that
call to action. Now we're going to
get it cool to value being built your website or rather than start
your free trial that could apply to
pretty much anything. But if you've got an
education based software, start learning today or if
you had subscribed now, we can have something like start saving today if you
are a banking app or you are an educator on how to actually manage your
finances, you name it. All of these
different things are applicable across so many
different industries. I just want you to switch that mentality of
yours to thinking about how you could have a cool to value rather
than a call to action. Because when you have
a quarter value, people are going to look
at that and go, Okay, if I do that, I'm actually
going to get this from it. They're going to
be far more likely to actually take action, knowing that by
taking that action, they're going to see
some value from it. A quarter value is going
to be far more effective, actually getting someone to
do it because it highlights a benefit for that
consumer, for that viewer. This relates back to a
previous point we mentioned, nobody cares what you do, but everybody cares
what you do for them. If you're highlighting
this benefit for them in the first place, they're able to look
at that and go, Hey, if I do this, if I enter my e-mail,
if I sign up, if I do this, I'm
actually going to be able to start
building my website. And you'll be able
to start learning today and about to start saving money is something that
benefits me as the viewers, the subscriber, because of doing this simple task that
you're directing me to do. So it's a very, very simple change, but one, a lot of people don't
actually do when they're writing what we normally
call a call to actions. So switch that mentality of
yours and start thinking quarter value rather
than call to action.
7. Copywriting Tip 6: Write How You Talk: Now moving on to my
next copywriting tip, and this is one that I
have had to think about greatly when building
my personal brand. Having a podcast has helped
me along the journey because it has played into
this role quite well. But I want you to think about when you are writing your copy, you should be writing
how you talk. And as an, a personal brand, this is where a lot of
people lack because quite often we write in a way that
we wouldn't actually talk. And people come to talk to
us as a personal brand. Let's say you're a coach and
people want your coaching. It comes to talk to
you and they think this person sounds nothing like they do in their content and they get put off a little. So you need to understand that your content needs to align with you in your brand and your personality as much
as you possibly can. And one of the
biggest ways to do that is in the way you write, the way he display yourself
in your content through your copywriting because
that's your voice. So you need to write as you talk so that you're not deceiving when people are consuming
your content and then come to talk or work with you, it will say, really helps
show your personality. It really helps build that trust because you're showing
your personality. And when you build that trust, people want to learn from you because they
learned to like you. They understand
your personality, they understand
the way you teach, they understand the way
you produce your content. They may find you funny, they might find you
really interesting, or they may just understand that because of the way you portray
yourself on social media, that you are the expert and
they should learn from you. Now writing how you talk can
be incredibly difficult, but there is one way that I honestly have used all the time when I'm actually
writing my coffee, when I'm responding
to messages as well, those direct messages we receive on social
media channels. And it's something
that's very simple. On our keyboards, on our phones, we go into our phones
and you are going to type in the bottom right
into your keyboard. If you've got an iPhone like me, you should see a little
microphone button. And what that actually
is is speech to text. And then we need to do is
talking to your phone. Then Apple or whatever
phone you may have actually started typing
what you're speaking. Because you are speaking, you know that you are writing in the exact same way you
would actually be talking. Now, this is fantastic
because we can also implement this into the
way we write our content. The same thing when we're
writing our content, we can use the same feature
captions you name it. Because we are speaking, we know exactly how
we are writing is true to ourselves and true to
what we would actually say. Now you may have to
go through and cut things out because
you do ramble on when you talk and you probably make too many points in the
beauty of copywriting is that you cut things down and make things as
simple as possible. So you need to do
that afterwards. But once you've got the
foundations in place, that's all you need and
you can go from there. And another benefit of this, you can speak way, way faster than you can
type where I can anyway, some people can target
ridiculous speeds, but me, I'm sure I can speak way, way faster than I can type so I can save a lot of
time by doing this, especially where
I'm responding to DMs or writing my captions, you name it, right? How you talk. There's so many benefits of doing this on social
media is really, really easy to forget
that the people that are viewing your content
of real people, you often put things out
on social media and think, Oh hey, is just putting out on social media screen,
you name it. There's real people. There's a real
human being sitting behind the phone the other end viewing your
piece of content. So they have true
human being feelings. They are reading your piece of content in a way that
they're going, Hey, this is interesting or I got
the emotion through this, or this was really intriguing. I really trust this person. I liked this
person's personality and I connect with
them because of this, I'd loved their way of teaching. You need to talk to them
like they're a real person. And to do that, you always
need to write how you talk. Because in a way, writing a torque,
it builds trust. As I said, I'm just gonna
go over the points again. Builds trust, shows
your personality. It builds deeper connections, increases your engagement in
grows your brand loyalty. There's so many benefits of writing how you talk when you are building a personal brand. The epi stupid not to. Please think about this. There were obviously
scenarios where you have to be more professional if
you aren't a personal brands, you might have to
tweak things slightly. But if you are building
a personal brand, start writing how you talk because you will see so
many benefits from him.
8. Copywriting Tip 7: The Goal Is To Keep People Reading: Now, moving on to the final tip that I
want to talk about it, I thought this was a nice one to round off on because it is something that many people forget when they are
writing their copy. We have one goal
when copywriting, whether it be for
pretty much anything, your goal is to
retain attention. First line, second line, third line for
flying thereafter, however many lines of copy
you may write you go is to just get somebody to
the next first line, second line, then the next. You need to think about this
when writing your copy, your first-line
be in that short, snappy, intriguing title to draw somebody in to your copy. That's how we start. That's what you want
to focus on first. That's how you're
gonna get somebody to actually stop reading
your piece of content. Second line, how are we going to build up that
person's interest? How are we going to make
sort the mate thinking, how are we going to relate
this piece of content to them? How are we going to
really start grabbing their emotion and making sure that they're fully invested in consuming this piece of
content on wanting to read on. Then how do we build that up? How do we get them on staff? Third line, how do we really keep them intrigued
and interested? And you get it further and
further along the line. You need to ensure
that you do deliver on that promise that you are
making in the beginning. Because if you don't,
you're going to leave somebody unsatisfied, then not going to
want to consume any more of your content
in the future. So first-line,
second-line, third-line, fulfilling when you structure your copywriting in this way, when you actually
review it and go back through it and you work
at it line by line to make sure that you are keeping people engaged
in providing that value and proving that you are the expert because
you deliver on what you promised before people know it there at the end
and they've read it. And you've retained
that attention. And then you're cool to value and they're
far more likely to act upon it now because
you have written a fantastic piece of copy, you've had them intrigued, you delivered on your promise, you provided them
with the value. Now you're cooling
them to value. You're getting them
to do something else. And because of that, that's when you can begin to
grow your business. That's when you can begin
to funnel people elsewhere, and that's where the fun
begins, but that is your goal. That is your only
goal of copyrighting. Keep people engaged,
keep people reading. First line, second
line, third line. That's what you need
to think about. Something I like to
do a review process. I like to go over
off every piece of copyrighting I've done is
I'll read through it and go. Okay, wouldn't actually consume this piece of content myself, if it's a piece of copyrighting
for a product or service, would this piece of
copy actually made me want to buy that
product or service? If the answer is
no, I don't use it. I don't post I tweak
it until the answer is yes because you are going to be a very harsh
critical of yourself. I certainly am. You make sure it gets to
a point where you are by x if you buy it or if you would consume that
piece of content, then there's gonna be a lot of other people
are out there. The also will. That is the final thing
I wanted to mention. I think it's quite
fitting to round off on. And I hope you've
enjoyed these points. I've mentioned.
9. Class Project and Conclusion: Now you have made it to the end of this
Skillshare course. I really hope some
of the tips I've mentioned have helped you in understanding a little bit
more about copywriting because it is something that
is very confusing at first, something that really does take practice and that's
all copywriting really is. At the end of it, you are going
to be rubbish at writing. At first every piece of
content that I've created, whether it be a POC cost and Instagram
posts, you name it. The first one I've
done has been awful. It's been so, so bad and I'm
almost embarrassed about it. But if you want embarrassed
by your first attempt, then you've got nowhere
to progress from. You can look back to that
in the future and go, Wow, look how far I've come. And that's part of the
reason why I leave all of my content there on social
media for people to consume. I don't delete old
Instagram posts or Roll podcast because I'm
embarrassed about them. It shows my journey, it shows how far I've come, shows that I know my skills, master my skills, you name it. That's what I want
you to do with yours, which won't need
to keep practicing for your class project. I actually want you to
create a social media post. It could be a carousel, it can be a single image posts, or it could be a
video that implements a script that is used
the copywriting methods. So I started talking
about in today's class, but I want you to
pick out two or three of the tips that
I've spoken about and implement into a piece of social media content and then upload that as your
class project. Very, very simple because you've probably going to go
and do this anyway. I wanted you to do is
then share that piece of content so the people can
look at what you've done, understand why you've done it, and learn from that as well. So share your project
with the rest of the students and that
would be fantastic. But if you have enjoyed
today's Skillshare class, I just wanted to let
you know about few of the resources that
I have for you. I am the host of the Social Media Marketing
School poke cost. And as of recording
this Skillshare class, there are over 270 episodes
for you to go and listen to. So if you've got
any questions with regards to anything
social media marketing, there is probably an answer
over there on that podcast, I release episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday, and they're all roughly around or
less than 15 minutes. I'm not keeping you
around for too long. Something didn't even listen
to whilst walking the dog, reading the newspaper or
drinking your morning coffee, you name it 15 minutes. That's all it is, but
they are packed with value and targeted towards you social media marketers
you want to learn and grow on social media. If you've got any questions with regards to anything
I've mentioned, please even leave a
discussion point or feel free to reach out
to me on Instagram, my handle is the ethan bridge. I will pop up a little thing here where you can see
my Instagram profile. But as I said, feel free
to send me a message over there and it'll be
more than happy to help. But I just want to round
this off by saying, thank you so much for tuning
in to this Skillshare class. I have a bunch of other
Skillshare classes so you can check out on all things social
media marketing, whether it be Instagram,
instagram stories, Instagram hashtags,
branding, you name it. They were all over. They're going to give
it a look and I hope to see you in my other classes.