More than half of the world is now on social media—which means you need a good social media strategy to reach your audience.
An effective strategy is one that gets your audience to engage with your social media posts.
Question is, how do you create posts that encourage engagement?
You may know of AIDA—Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action—a well-known framework for writing compelling web copy. Social media posts follow a similar structure that contains three parts.
This short and sweet article will show you the three-part structure of engaging social media post captions.
Let’s dive right in.
PART 1: THE HOOK
A hook, in social media post captions, asks a tantalizing question or picks a fight by implying something controversial. Start your post caption with any of these elements to reel your reader in:
- A failure you experienced – Avoid hooks that lie about your results or opinions. You might win attention today but you’ll quickly fall back to square one when your audience discover that you’re not authentic
- A self-evident description of a useful resource, e.g. “My favorite tools for creating valuable content are…”
- An unbelievable statistic or quote – Send a polarizing message by saying something that either shocks your audience or sides strongly with their opinion
- State that the status quo is wrong – Reject conformity. Find something you believe is wrong with your industry and use it
Remember, you’re not the only one fighting for your audience’s attention. Every day she’s bombarded with social media ads, messages, calls, notifications, emails, all begging for her attention.
If you run campaigns with the same message as everybody else, your post won’t stand out. Your marketing hook must follow at least one of the above four rules if you’re going to compete successfully—the more the better.
PART 2: THE CONTEXT
First came the hook. Then came the context.
Many posts fail to engage an audience because they don’t have the proper context to carry the audience to the call-to-action or zinger.
Adding context to your post means giving your reader a bigger, more telling picture. You provide the little details to help make things clearer instead of being too general, unspecific or uninteresting.
To provide the right context, you need to be clear about your writing goals as well as your audience’s expectations and tolerations.
In a blog, the context would be the value that the article sets out to deliver.
In an ad, the context would be the solution you’re offering and customer objections you must overcome.
In your post, the context should be what your audience will take away from your writing—not what you’re trying to sell.
When you understand the context you’re working in, you achieve your goal of audience engagement.
PART 3: THE ZINGER
The zinger is what gets your post a comment, share, like or other reaction.
Good zingers are like insight bombs that leave readers with something to think about.
Your zinger can be a video, podcast, image, infographic, spreadsheet, text, pretty much anything with relevant information for your audience.
Check out this example from the Prime Results Facebook page to see how the three parts of an engaging post—hook, context, and zinger—work together:
Writing engaging social media posts is a skill like any other—the more you practice, the better you become at getting it right.
I hope this short guide gives you a better idea of how to craft posts that get you more engagement. Spend some time researching and putting together the hook, context, and zinger for your next social media posts to give them that extra oomph.
But don’t stop there—check out the following article to help you build on your journey:
5 Actionable Strategies to Boost Your Facebook Engagement
Happy posting!
