Writing Quality, Conscious Socials
Planning, writing and curating social media content for conscious brands
By Rose Mascaro, founder of HeartWriting, with special guest Samie Joy of Studio Sama: Soulful Marketing
Hey there beautiful, conscious, heart-led biz babe.
We see you. We see you hustling every day to create quality content for your delicious brand. It’s so exciting to start a business, especially when you’re a conscious founder of a brand that’s going to make a difference. You already have a clear-cut vision of how this brand is going to roll out over the next few years. You know the lives that you’re going to touch, and the minds that you’re going to inspire. You’ve manifested the goals, and you’re posting from those inspired embers in your heart.
But we also see some things you could be doing better in your social media. So we decided to create this blog for you to help you get crystal clear on your business needs before you keep posting to infinity with no strategy.
There’s no point posting if you haven’t got a clear why and how. You need to speak your truths effectively while sharing heart wide open to your dream clients!
Here is your guide to help your social media touch hearts while creating sales conversions. We’ve teamed together to teach you how to drive inspiring, conscious content purposefully, and confidently, in order to convert to the sales that will ultimately build your business into the heart-centred empire it deserves to be.
Because without sales, you can’t grow.
And without a social media strategy, you can’t make sales.
So take the journey with us, babe. Pick up your pen, and start taking notes so that your boss biz strategy can start to shine.
Step 1: Get clear on your business and branding needs.
The truth is, despite your enthusiasm and heart, you probably don’t have a clear marketing strategy, do you? (ahem… if you’re like 95% of people out there). Don’t worry, it’s better late than never! Grab your pen and start clarifying your biz from the ground up:
VALUES: What are your brand values? Jot these down as words. For example: sustainability, efficiency, harmony. A brand’s values guide and direct a brand’s actions. They articulate its purpose, shape its structure, and define its intent.
DREAM AUDIENCE: Who are the ideal clients you want to attract to your offering/ work with? If you had to get really specific, what age group, gender, status, salary, and interests describe your TOP audience? Who are you NOT targeting and why?
Every business has a specific niche and a very specific target audience they are speaking to, which influences the tone and language purpose/effect. Whether wealthy Australian women 35 – 45, or tradie men 25 – 35, or cute asian girls who like Starbucks iced lattes… It seriously has to be this specific when designing a brand tone for people. But almost everyone is too afraid to get specific. It’s got something to do with fear that if they get really niche, they will lose customers, which is absolutely NOT the case. It’s actually the opposite. When you try to speak to everyone, you’re speaking to absolutely no-one. Nobody can connect with you.
Are you talking to Kath from Kath and Kim, or Prue, or Kel, Sharon? To truly connect to your dream client, you need to speak to them as they would love to be spoken to. That’s how you sell.
Unique Selling Point/ Elevator Pitch: If you had 15 – 30 seconds to explain to a high-powered CEO what your business is all about, could you say it clearly and confidently, with as few words as possible? This statement is going to help solve your client’s specific problem, and invoke immediate desire: “I must have this in my life now to make my life easier/better.”
PERSONALITY: How would you describe your brand personality? Soft and warm? Sassy and inspiring? Punchy and witty?
YOU: This one is about you, the CEO. What makes YOU different and amazing as a person, and therefore a CEO?
PROMISE: What’s your promise to your dream customers? Create a concise, clear ‘statement of promise’ that suggests what makes this business special, unique, and trustworthy.
Need more help? Fill out this free, no-strings attached branding questionnaire we created to help you find some clarity on these questions. https://heartwriting.com.au/branding-questionnaire/
Step 2: Start developing ideas for posts.
Now that you’re crystal clear about the foundations of your business, you’ll have lots of good ideas for content that can connect with your dream clients. As writers, we know that sometimes you just need to get writing to get the ideas really rolling. Here’s some quick ideas to start developing your social media content. Remember, this stage is just about drafting lots of ideas.
- Connection Stories: Anecdotes and stories, fun facts, behind the scenes, relatable and inspirational content.
- Conversation Starters: Transformations and results, features and benefits, reviews, testimonials, and tutorials.
Step 3: Design the “Four Content Pillars” of Your Business
Working with content pillars creates the foundations for your brand. But we also like the analogy of using a social compass to guide you. Determine your North, East, South and West, which often looks like the following (but not always):
North: ‘Inspire’
This pillar is about sharing inspiring content like quotes, stories, life behind the scenes, etc.
East: ‘Educate’
This pillar showcases your skills and knowledge by sharing information that your audience learns from and engages with. It might be a writing hack, fun fact, tips and tricks, ‘did you know’, anything really that can be shared with the intention of education.
South: ‘Connect’
This pillar is all about humanising your business. Sharing ‘who’, ‘why’ and the story around the person behind the brand. Humanising your brand helps potential customers feel connected to your business through you and your personality whilst helping build trust, familiarity and loyalty.
West: ‘Convert’
This pillar is related to your social media goals. Do you want sales or engagement? It’s all about highlighting your services or offerings, generating sales or leads, presenting a call to action. Whatever the intention/need is. Testimonials, reviews and portfolio fit into this pillar.
Step 4: Planning Your Social Media Using a Content Calendar
This is the most fun part! Start planning out your week using your pillars, and spacing them out so that you don’t have similar topics right up against each other. Remember, variety is the spice of life! Keep things fun-filled and exciting. Always produce content that will intrigue and benefit your audience more than you. This means that you’ll retain a loving, loyal audience.
You might like to include inspiring content such as:
- Beautiful/ funny quotes that resonate for your audience
- Stories of similar sensory experiences around the world
- Funny, related memes (create your own!)
- Reels of soul work “in progress”
- About you, The Founder: your ‘why’ of starting your business
- How the business works/ is changing the world
- The customer ‘experience’
- Testimonials and client stories
- Latest heartfelt offerings.
Step 5: Write Conscious + Concise Captions
Time to get funny, deep, witty and creative! However, it’s not quite the same as a creative writing class. This is a game of ‘word and attention economy’. No matter how sweet an industry you are in, you need to write simply and concisely. ‘Cut the fat’ out of your sentences and don’t use up all the character spaces just because you can (speaking from my own personal vice here).
Social media is characterised by limited attention spans AND maximum scroll-speeds. You’ll need to simplify and tone down the beautiful lexicon you usually weave through your conscious business copy. You only have about SEVEN seconds to grab your audience’s attention – so it’s important you begin with a simple, fast hook to reel your audience in, and break up the paragraphs so it’s easier to read.
Instagram is such an effective leverage for your business, so by all means use it with flair and enthusiasm! But don’t get it confused with a blogging platform. It’s primarily visual. If you want to write an essay (like this one!) post it on your blog, add the link to your bio, and simply write a short teaser for it in your caption.
But you are encouraged to use your brand personality in order to shine! Your brand voice is the sound of your brand – which includes specific language use that makes you relatable, desirable and recognisable to your dream audience. If your brand had a ‘voiceover’, how would it sound? Voice it out. Write it out, like you’re talking naturally to a friend.
If you’re really stuck with this one, ask us and we can help. After all, this is your opportunity to position yourself as an expert in your field, so don’t skip this important step! Formal or informal, poetic or sassy, think about what language and punctuation could help to create your brand voice. You can learn how to develop authentic voice in the HeartWriting Level 1 Workshop.
But most importantly, avoid convincing and manipulating your audience. You don’t need to use salesy, pushy language, which feels pretty ick for conscious businesses. Speak directly to your niche audience in a heartfelt, honest way. Open your heart to your target audience, and they will open theirs too.
Step 6: Imagery to go with the words
Before posting on visual social media platforms such as Instagram, we recommend hiring a graphic designer to start up your visual content. If you’re a conscious brand, you want to make a meaningful impact, right? So don’t cut corners. It’s OK to dream big, bold and brave – even if your message is soft, sweet and harmonious. Treat your business with the love it deserves.
We are both great with words, but not so great with graphics. With big dreams to make a positive and powerful impact with our conscious creative brands, we decided to invest in professional branding: and what a brilliant decision that was. Lauren Nicholson from LNC Studio designed both of our brands, from logos to fonts, to layouts and colour palettes. She also creates socials templates and branding guides, saving hundreds of hours of confusion and indecision. Our brands now look professional and pleasing to our target audiences, resulting in higher impact and exponentially increased sales. And we feel so much more confident creating our visual content!
Lauren from LNC says, “An impactful social media presence is achieved through posting high quality content that is on-brand, eye-catching and valuable to your audience. Keeping your branding consistent across your social media platforms plays an integral part in maintaining brand recognisability.”
If you have already chatted with a visual branding artist and you’ve got your colour palette, logo and branding ready to go, Canva is wonderful for creating a few templates with your brand colours that you can re-use over and over again with different content.
Pexels and Unsplash are great options for free images if you don’t have any professional photos of your own to use. It’s a crime to use other people’s images without their permission, so if you’re a new biz owner, keep this motto in mind: I will never screenshot images from another brand or an unknown source. Download a series of free-to-use or paid + licensed images that won’t get you into any hot water, and please research rules on copyright.
Of course, the best option is to curate your own professional imagery! We hired Ingrid Photography, a renowned branding photographer on the Central Coast, and we love the result of her creative images and fun-filled shoots! She’s got a great free guide to planning a branding shoot that you can download from her website: https://ingridphotography.com.au/
These days, smartphones are a sufficient way to capture some images of yourself, your life, and your business without needing a professional branding shoot. Next time you feel a million bucks, be sure to take a headshot to use for your social media!
Step 7: To reel... or not to reel
For a while now we’ve been hearing the strong message that the only way to get somewhere on social media is through video content. Brands have switched out their photo imagery for reels echoing the latest Tik Tok trends. However, Instagram has recently admitted that we are seeing value and growth again in still imagery and carousels.
That doesn’t mean you should forget about the power of video – after all, nothing engages quite like ‘real life’. We asked Australian content creator Rebecca from @thatachellesgirl about her thoughts on social media growth trends, and whether you should keep creating reels.
Rebecca says, “Reels are important for your business, especially when you factor in that 60% of Instagram users are aged 18-34 years old. If that’s your target demographic then wouldn’t you want to get in front of them? Video content allows you to reach a new/wider audience, faster. Reels also give you more creative freedom (add music, text, play with editing)! They instantly show more of your personality, which leads to more views and follows. If you can learn to put aside your feelings of discomfort and just film/post the damn thing, you’ll already be ahead of the majority of business owners who are too self-conscious to show up on their profile.
“My top tips for getting confident behind the camera: take the time to do your hair and makeup so you’re (literally) putting your best face forward. Practise saying things to the camera and recording yourself doing little jobs in your biz at least every second day so it becomes more natural for you. Remember that having natural light beaming in on your face is the most flattering. Always aim to film facing an open window. When I have to say things on camera, I nearly always prepare a script or write out dot points first and then I record snippets of each part to get it right. Finally, record multiple takes of yourself performing the same action over and over again (or speaking!) so that you have options when you’ve finished and you’re sitting down to edit.
“My easiest content idea? Film a “come with me…” style video by taking lots of short snippet videos of your day. These types of everyday videos are honestly so underrated. I love just watching creators be themselves and go about their daily lives, don’t you?”
If you want more video content inspiration from Rebecca, download her free “7 Days Of Content Creation” manual, on www.thatachellesgirl.com.
Step 8: Add your captions and schedule your posts
Time to add your captions to your imagery and post – but don’t do it the hard way! We live in a world buzzing with technology, so why not make the most of its perks, especially for organisation and automation. We use the scheduling software Later to plan and arrange our desired image feeds in order to ‘post’ automatically at times when our audiences are most active.
It’s so much easier to plan two weeks’ worth of content, throw it in the software, and allow it to do its thing, while also keeping an eye on how it will roll out visually. We also receive insights on post performance. Pre-scheduling your posts also counts as effective business automation, as Timothy Ferriss recommends in his book, The 4-Hour WorkWeek – saving you time and energy so that you can get on with the jobs that really matter.
We suggest spending a few hours every second Monday planning, writing and scheduling all your content into your software for two weeks, so you can sit back and focus on your creative dream.
Last and Best Social Media Tips
PLEASE be original
There is nothing worse than finding out that a beloved hero of a brand ripped off someone else just to churn out some quick content. Never underestimate the value of original words and ideas!
By all means, use inspiration from others. Even Shakespeare did. Romeo and Juliet wasn’t his idea; it was originally a 14th Century Italian tale. Shakespeare just took the concept, shined it up, and made it unforgettably his own, through original language, characterisation, sonnet style, and Shakespearean plot.
It’s not bad to look around you for ideas, just strive to create your own interpretation. Use a journal to take notes when inspiration strikes. That way, your handwriting will translate to your own thoughts and voice radiating onto that page.
Beautiful. Original. Believable. Authentic. That’s what inspires and sells.
Use emojis and punctuation sparingly
Effective writing is also about the decorations you use around the language. Some people think that the way to create a personality-packed brand voice is to use a lot of exclamation points!!! (Yuck right?!?!)
Cut out the excess. If you really feel the need to use an exclamation mark, just use one, strategically, once.
I repeat, once. At most.
The same goes for emojis. They are no longer on-trend. Just use one or two classy emojis that won’t detract from your message.
However, DO use bullets or dashes to create lists. Lists are great. They break up the text and make things easier to read, which is basically the whole idea when it comes to social media.
Consistent number of posts each week
Consistency is the most important puzzle-piece in creating feed-based content.
Don’t overwhelm your audience (or yourself), but equally don’t underwhelm. Decide how many posts you can commit to weekly – just doing two or three is fine! But keep it consistent each week. When you feel like it’s easily become part of your routine, you may wish to build on it.
If you choose to create two posts each week, then you’ll work through your compass over two weeks. E.g.:
Week One: Inspire and Connect.
Week Two: Educate and Convert.
Include CTAs: Call To Action
Have a think about your social media goals and what you want your post to achieve. Do you want customers to head to your website and purchase the product you spoke about, or do you want them to comment their opinion below to increase engagement?
At the end of almost every post, write a CTA (call to action) which invites people to:
–Click the link in the bio to see how it works (do you have a links page set up like ours?)
–Click the link in the bio to buy this gift of a lifetime for your loved ones.
–Wanna hear more? Dm now for more info.
–Place a heart below if you agree!
–What’s your love language? Mine’s _____. Write yours below and tag a friend!
Defining Hashtags
Hashtags are important because they allow you to reach wider, untapped audiences. There are a lot of different ways that experts say you should develop your hashtags, but the main idea is to connect meaningfully with your ideal clients/customers.
Use keywords that your dream clients will likely be searching, and build them out. We use four categories:
–Location based
–Industry based
–Audience based
–Post based.
What about AI? Should You Use ChatGTP?
You might think that, as writers, we are totally against ChatGTP, like it’s a sin to even mention it here – how dare we use a robot to write our text?
And to stipulate: in all honesty, this article is completely, 100%, written by us.
But we recognise that AI is a clever tool. Just like how our smartphones are tools. Just like how all writers use Google to look for ideas to clarify their research. Do you remember everyone up in arms about smartphones when they first came out? Now we can’t get those bloody phones out of your hands.
Be real. Just like every other form of technology, AI is designed to assist. But it can never replace real people, real communication and real relationships, can it?
If you’re a writer, you won’t just be replaced by AI. That’s like saying that accountants are out of jobs because of bookkeeping technology. We still need writers. We won’t just be handing literature and word personalisation over to robots.
People will always choose people, in the end. Especially those with heart. So we aren’t too worried about using AI, so long as you use it ethically. It’s fine if you’re using it with conscious care and intent for your business; however, we suggest only using it for basic idea generation and structure, and then injecting the paragraphs with your own ideas, flair, and tone of voice to connect meaningfully to the hearts of your dream audience.
About Good Ads
Consider the following advice about creating ads from Hubspot.com:
“Use simple and easy-to-understand language.
Ad copywriting is not an avenue to channel your inner Victorian author. It doesn’t matter if you’re an Insta-famous poet or you’ve won a Pulitzer — using verbose language in your Facebook ads will confuse your prospects.
When writing ad copy, the main goal is to make it easy for anyone to understand. When a prospect sees your ad, they should instantly know:
––What your offer is.
––How it will benefit them.
––What to do next.”
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/facebook-paid-ad-checklist
Stuck? Blocked? Just hire someone to do it for you
Running a smart conscious business means knowing where your strength lies, and focusing on that with a heart full of inspiration, while outsourcing the jobs that take up your precious genius work. We certainly know this lesson (word wizards aren’t usually known as number-masters, if you get the drift). If you’re keen to get back to what you do best, hire a copywriter, content creator or marketing expert to do the hard work for you. We can certainly offer you some help – just reach out.
We hope you loved this blog designed to help you create quality, conscious socials!
Head to @heartwriting.com.au www.heartwriting.com.au to join Rose’s writing workshops + book mentoring/ editing services, and @studiosama__ www.studiosama.com.au for soulful marketing and copywriting services for conscious creatives.
