How to write (well) for social media

If you search "writing for social media" in Google, you'll get around 314 million results (yes, million). With such a huge number of potential resources at your hands, how does one narrow these results down to a more manageable number?

The goal of my Storify post was to explore the issue of writing for social media, so I quickly needed to decide how best to wade through the 314 million website hits. I started with the EXSM3989 assigned readings on the topic and went from there. What keywords and topics were used most often in the posts? I then searched Google to bring up the most popular/viewed blog posts and searched the bloggers Twitter accounts for additional hashtags.

The elements included in my post were blog posts, videos, tweets and Facebook posts that I found both informative and engaging, while also being general enough for such a broad topic. The blog posts on writing for both Twitter and Facebook were similar in providing a great foundation for writing tweets and posts and reinforcing that good writing is good writing no matter the platform.

My post in no way gives a full picture of writing for social media, and I don't think that any one blog post or book out there provides a comprehensive how-to of writing for social media. If there was, would there really be 314 million Google results on the topic? What I've tried to do is present a very basic introduction to social media and why it's necessary, and then provided some excellent information on how to construct engaging tweets and posts and examples from companies who use Twitter and Facebook very well.

Writing for social media is an incredibly huge and diverse topic that can be examined from hundreds of angles. The below Storify post could easily be a starting point for a longer academic essay. Each social media platform has different purposes, as well as best practices and even demographics. An essay could easily be written on any number of the above mentioned topics.