Creative Writing for Social Media Marketing

Hello Friends, welcome to learnvern.

In the last session we learnt the importance of having a linkedin profile as it is the most important social media platform. If you are seeking a job, or wish to grow in your career or if you are a startup or planning to set up a new business then linkedin can prove to be the most useful social media platform. Apart from this we also saw the best practices of Linkedin.

So let us from here start a new module and that is creative writing.

Creative writing is such a module that will be useful to you in all the aspects of digital marketing, may it be social media, may it be blogs, or any other aspect. Creative writing focuses on and helps in all the channels or businesses of social media and digital marketing.

It also is able to provide the content one level up to the audience and readers.

In this session, we will also be looking at the difference between creative writing and content writing.

You would have heard people saying “we write content”

You would also have heard people saying “we write creative content”

There is a slight difference between the 2.

I recall that once I was in a training program and one of my professors shared with me a very interesting fact.

He said: Nitin, do you know that creative people are right brained

Our brain is divided into 2 hemisphere- one is left brain and the other is right brain

What does a left brain do? Left brain deals with rationality, with logic, with maths, with quantitative aptitude

So people who are left brained tend to be very sharp in maths, sharp in logic.

If you give a mathematical problem they will be able to solve it quickly.

Whereas right-brained people, that is people with a heavy right brain, usually are artists, painters, musicians, that is they are more into the creative field.

So creative writing is such a field where you need to make use of your right brain.

My professor also shared another fact a few years ago when I was attending the training program that the left part of your body controls your right brain. So when you perform any activity with your left hand, it will have an impact on your right brain. So try to do work with your left hand like brush your teeth with your left hand, pick up items with your left hand or any other activity. This will definitely activate your right brain and will lead to more creativity in you.

So let us understand what creative writing is and how it works.

As you can see the definition from the screen, creative writing basically involves certain texts that are not necessary to read.

Right so there are certain such texts that aren't important or necessary for you to read but the audience does read them.

Do you know why?

Because they want to get entertained, they read them for entertainment.

The writing style  here flows or moves freely with the help of figures of speech.

And the writer here intends to educate the audience and the writer has the ability and the liberty to express his thoughts freely to the users and the audiences and thus can portray things creatively.

In the upcoming sessions I will show you and explain to you how brands express their thoughts creatively on social media platforms. Infact this is extensively used in email marketing also.

I have included a small part of email marketing in the session as I feel this is very important for you to understand. For example while sending an email, can you make a creative subject line? If yes, then how does it work?

So you would have by now understood the definition of creative writing and how it works.

Now let us understand the major differences between creative writing and content writing.

The first difference, as I had shared, is that feelings, ideas, expressions and emotions - all of these you find in creative writing.

Whereas when we talk about content writing, it is basically for blogs, is written for marketing campaigns, is written for a specific set objective - this is what we call content writing.

So that is basically for blogs or marketing campaigns.

Objective - what is the objective of creative writing?

Expression of own personal thoughts or feelings to entertain and amuse readers.

You would have a seen a trending thing on social media which is called as MEMEs

So memes are very funny. You would have seen memes on the latest news or updates, you would have seen memes on the launch of iphone. IF some incident takes place then the meme community immediately becomes active.

So meme definitely fulfils the entertainment and amuse objective of creative writing.

So the objective here is very clear and that is to present the personal thoughts in such a way that the audience gets entertained.

When we talk about content writing -  the objective is to inform, opine or to persuade the reader to purchase a product. Or I want the reader to perform a certain action or call to action.

For example if I want the reader to download an ebook or I want the reader to sign up a lead form, then such particular actions or a set defined action will come under the scope of content writing.

So what kind of content will it include?

It includes journals, diaries, stories, poetries, essays, scripts, and memories.. So whatever comes in free writing space falls in creative writing.

And in content writing - factual, freedom, emotions, factual related content like blogs or web marketing campaigns, these things fall under content writing.

Where all can this be used?

In some blogs you can use creative writing, in social media, in magazines as well.

Content writing can be used in SEO, on client websites, packaging and emails too.

So both, creative writing and content writing can be used at both places. You just need to check the communication tone of the brand for which you are writing the content. Is it formal or is it informal?

I will give examples of a few brands who communicate with their customers in an informal way.

Customers appreciate and praise thus a lot as they communicate by being informal, human and personal. You are not communicating in a formal way or with a formal touch. This also makes them feel that their relationship is very personal and at a deeper level.

Content Style - as we discussed that entertainment becomes our prime content style.

And in content writing it follows a proper structure where we often try to solve a unique problem.

How many content categories exist in Digital Media, let me quickly share the list in bullets.

There are a lot of content categories in digital media like:

• Blog posts
• Articles
• White papers
• Ebooks, reports
• Podcasts - are growing fast like google podcasts, money control podcasts. If you have heard of a social media app called “Clubhouse”, then you may be aware that only audio related content gets published in Clubhouse.

• Then we have Email newsletters
• Nurturing campaigns
• Videos - like we just learnt in a youtube session that under the description heading we have 5000 characters, so what will you write in these 5000 characters? You will have to write something creative only then will you be able to engage the users.

• Then in Thought Leadership - you can publish articles related to this
• POV’s - point of views you can publish that
• Infographics also can be made.
• How to guide is very popular on social media and websites for how to set up a facebook page, how to set up a facebook business manager. People search a lot for these. So if you are able to make a content on this and share with people then I am sure that your blog and your website will receive a lot of traction. I was checking the search volume while discussing with my colleague and I asked him how many people in the USA search for “ how to set up a business manager?” To this my colleague replied that over 5 Lakh people in the USA are looking for this search query. We use a lot of tools to source this information and from there we got to know this. Thus it helps us to know the demand for this in the market . So how to guide is definitely a great channel to engage the users.
• You can create Social media posts too
• You can make case studies and client profiles
• You can create webinars too

As I had mentioned earlier, content touches all the business domains may it be public relations, customer service, or marketing or thought leadership or human resources - everywhere social media is being used as on date. We saw this in our first unit too that social media helps in diverse business domains and creative writing too helps the business domains may it be blogs, may it be twitter.

If you recall, I had shared an example of twitter that a lot of brands like telecom brands, insurance brands - all of them use twitter as a customer service platform. If any user has a telecom related problem, say for example that his internet isnt working properly or his phone is facing some network related issues. In such a case what will he do? He will tweet that this is my location, I live here and I am unable to access my internet. So twitter thus becomes a very important channel for customer service and there are many such youtube or forums that are important in the domain related to the public.

That is all for today. If you have any queries or comments, click the discussion button below the video and post there. This way, you will be able to connect to fellow learners and discuss the course. Also, Our Team will try to solve your query.

So that is all in today’s unit. We have understood the definition of creative writing but how to write creatively and what are its best practices, all these we will see in our next unit. And a unit next to it we will also see how brands publish their content creatively.

Good Bye, see you in the next session.