Status updates are amazing tools because they can drive tons of traffic to your site, expose you to new customers, and increase the trust factor that will get people to buy your services or products. With a single update, you can have people loving your business, clicking on your link, and sharing that update to expand your audience.
Maybe you’re telling your audience about a sale, or a new team member, or a new location for your business. Social media is the place where you can share anything you want with the people who will care the most! Think of it as relationship-building on a large scale — a free way of interacting with hundreds or thousands of people at once.
This is why you can’t listen to the people that say that social media is a waste of time. That couldn’t be further from the truth! No other marketing, promotional, or advertising platform allows you to achieve all of these things for free in front of such a huge audience.
However, on social media, it isn’t just what you say that matters — it’s how you say it. People use networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to have fun — not to read up on corporate bulletins and press releases — so a conversational tone and even a bit of humor generally go a long way.
Your status updates should be the least formal. Just try to sound less like a business, and more like a person talking about a business. Because that’s what you actually are! When you write a status update, try reading it out loud afterward. Does it sound like something you would say on the phone, or to a friend? If not, you may need to rethink your tone, or that update may not reach its full potential.
So how do you write a really, really clickworthy status update?
What’s the secret? Your goal should always be to awaken curiosity, because that’s what encourages clicks and brings in the traffic you’re looking for.
Generally speaking, your status updates should:
- Be USEFUL to the reader,
- Provide him with a sense of URGENCY,
- Convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow UNIQUE; and
- Do all of the above in an ULTRA-SPECIFIC way.
A few questions you can ask yourself to make your social updates more powerful:
- Does your status update offer the reader a reward for reading?
- What specifics could you add to make your status update more intriguing and believable?
- Does your status update trigger a strong, actionable emotion the reader already has about the subject at hand?
- Does your status update present a proposition that will instantly get your prospect nodding his or her head?
- Could you add an element of intrigue to drive the prospect into your opening copy?
Don’t be boring
Almost any status update can be made more interesting.
Advertising legend David Ogilvy knew the power of words, and how they literally determined whether the advertisement would get read. He rewrote this famous headline for an automobile advertisement 104 times:
“At 60 miles an hour, the only thing you hear in the new Rolls Royce is the ticking of the dashboard clock …”
You got the point.
As an exercise, let’s take a remarkably boring update and see how we can improve it, one revision at a time.
Read my new blog post
Read my new blog post on cats
Find out why this guy recently adopted 22 cats
Can you handle 22 cats at once? The shocking story of one brave man who did just that!
These are all potential status updates for the same exact post. The first one probably won’t get many shares — or even many clicks — but the last one? That’s got the curiosity factor.
Who can resist clicking that link? Who the heck adopted 22 cats at once? When you spend a little extra time making your status updates more intriguing, you will soon see increase in clicks, shares and engagement. You want to be a star on the status update playground?
Try different things, and remember — it’s supposed to be fun!
Time for action
It’s time to put all that information about status updates to good use.
Do you want to go from no leads on social media to getting leads all the time? From spending hours a day on your social accounts to having it all automated and ready to go?
We’re all super busy entrepreneurs, and a lot of us are the ones wearing pretty much every hat when it comes to running the business. Often, we have big plans for our social media and our marketing that just never get done. We forget. We don’t have the hours. Plugging in and posting new updates all the time – sounds like mission impossible.
When you automate your social media, you can pretty much set it and forget it — that way, wherever you are and whatever else you’re busy with, you can rest assured that your social media updates are actually getting taken care of.
Here is where DigitalOcto – your social media automation tool — comes in handy.
Start out simple, with 2-3 status updates per week. Can you manage that? I am sure you can.
As time goes on and you build up a bigger library of status updates on DigitalOcto, the tool will start posting for you every day without you having to do anything! So let’s get started!