Category: Guidelines

How to write killer blogs and LinkedIn articles

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I’m putting together some toolkits for Hallam staff who are using social media to tell their stories and engage with their audiences.

So this is the first in a series. It’s a simple how-to guide for people who want to write blogs and LinkedIn articles.

I’ll repost this under a new ‘Toolkits’ sub-heading in the social media guidelines.

What should I write about?

Your blog – whether you’re hosting it on WordPress or posting it on LinkedIn – is a window into your expertise, and you as a communicator. A good blog isn’t used as somewhere to store research papers and resources, or a method of sending out information. It’s a way for people to get a sense of your expertise, your ideas and your values.

So you should write about those things. Your expertise is what makes you different. Your ideas are what people will take away from your blog, and your values are what will keep them coming back.

A great way to get started is to write about something that’s in the news, and examine it through the unique lens of your expertise, ideas and values.

How many words?

The ideal blog post or LinkedIn article length is anywhere from 600 to 800 words, depending on the amount of rich media that you’re including in the post.

Getting the structure right

Your first paragraph is important. Along with the headline, it’s the hook that convinces the reader to read on.

Try a few different ways of opening your post, and run them by friends and colleagues. You could reference a recent news event, explore a personal reflection, or make a dramatic statement.

Once you’ve hooked them, your reader is likely to skim-read, so use section breaks, sub-headings, lists and bullets to break blocks of text up, and keep paragraphs short (one to three sentences).

Images and videos do the same thing, and they can help you illustrate a point. Make sure you have usage rights for visual assets. You can use the search tools on Google image search to find images that have been labelled for reuse.

Always check the usage rights for images

Picture captions can be a fun way to highlight a key point and re-engage the reader

Embed URLs as hyperlinks, and set them to open in a new window, so that your readers stay on your blog.

You want to take your reader on a journey throughout your post, so promise them something juicy (revelation, insight, facts) early on, then deliver it in the middle section.

Wrap things up with key takeaways and learnings, but don’t worry about making your ending too neat and perfect. You can leave loose ends for another post.

If you’re in doubt about how to end the article, pose your readers a question. Ask for feedback, opposing views, other sources.

And remember: your blog post is supposed to be a conversation-starter. Ask for comments, and respond to them. Maybe you’ll get ideas for a follow-up post.

Language, tone and punctuation

Unless you’re writing for a niche audience, plain language is a good idea. So, if you want to reach a wider audience, keep jargon to a minimum.

Avoid cliches and archaic words and phrases (use ‘while’ instead of ‘whilst’, for example). Your sentences should be a maximum of 30 words long. Your grammar and punctuation are important, but don’t use overly-complicated punctuation (I heartily recommend R L Trask’s Penguin Guide to Punctuation, by the way – it busts a lot of myths).

Use exclamation points sparingly, and only ever one at a time. Question marks can be used as and when you need them, and are also solitary characters.

Pay attention to the rhythm of your writing. Vary the length of your sentences to add pace and dynamics. Try it. It’s fun.

And it’s fine to start the odd sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’. But don’t overdo it.

Your tone of voice should be warm, personal and direct (‘During the event, I was amazed to learn that…’, ‘By now, you’ve probably noticed that…’). If you’re writing something from a position of authority, you can afford to have a more authoritative tone of voice, but beware of sounding pompous.

I don’t recommend writing about yourself in the third person. Ever.

Remember, a blog post isn’t a news bulletin or an announcement. It’s more than technical writing: it should give the reader an insight into the situation or issue from the author’s point of view.

Your blog’s not just informative: we want to see the human being behind the words.

Different approaches to headlines

Write the headline last. You want to address the reader directly, so make it engaging. It could be counter-intuitive and subversive (‘Why face-to-face meetings are making you less productive’) – if that gives you a springboard into an interesting argument.

The list-article format (‘Six ways to manage your inbox’) works for some people, but don’t use it for every blog post, because your blog will start to look like clickbait.

Here are some common approaches for blog post titles:

  • Numbered lists: “Five cat photos that changed the internet”
  • Dates: “The best cats on the internet in January 2017”
  • Questions: “Why are cats so popular on the internet?”
  • Call-to-action: “Download our expert guide to cats on the internet”

Tags are important

Be sure to add some relevant tags to your post before you publish. They help people find your posts. You might want to use categories, if your blog has that functionality, so that people can easily search and browse your blog.

Writing on LinkedIn

To post your blog on LinkedIn, log in to your account and hit the ‘write an article’ button in the status update box. This will take you to a simple WordPress-style interface, where you can:

  • Upload a header image
  • Insert a title for your article
  • Add formatted text, including bullet points and sub-headers
  • Add rich media, such as images, videos and links

You can publish your article by hitting the ‘publish’ button in the top right, or you can close the browser window and come back to it later – it will auto-save.

When you publish your article, you’ll be asked to add a status update so that you share the link from your profile. Add a comment about your article and hit ‘publish’. You’ve just posted your first article on LinkedIn!

If you look in your browser’s address bar, you’ll see you’ve got a unique URL for that LinkedIn article, so copy it and share it with your networks.

By the way, here’s a really good article about writing on LinkedIn. A lot of it applies to blogging in general. Have fun, and let me know if you found this useful.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

Six principles of doing video better

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There’s been a massive growth in online video consumption in the last two or three years. According to the latest stats, half of us are regularly watching video on mobile devices.

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And the trend is set to continue. No big surprises, then.

But the definition of video is changing: we watch video on a plethora of platforms, in a number of different formats.

We watch disposable 15-second clips, filmed in portrait and covered in scribbles and doodles, on Snapchat and Instagram. We watch two-minute semi-professional instructional videos, product reviews and comedy skits on YouTube. And we watch live streams on Facebook and Periscope.

Video has grown sideways as well as upwards.

This trend brings a problem for the content producers: saturation. As organisations cotton on to this trend, they shift their focus to producing video content, and social media users become overloaded, swiping and scrolling past your carefully-crafted video.

So there’s a need to adapt. These are some of things I’ve been doing to adapt. You might find them useful too.

My six principles of doing video better

  1. Make shorter videos. Vine may be dead, but short viewing times are here to stay. They say a photograph should say one thing – it should have one idea to communicate. Video needs to be the same.
  2. Subtitles. People are watching with the sound down, so bite the bullet and sub your videos if they’re for social channels.
  3. Make it about people. If you can, make it about your audience. Who are they? What do they want? Tell them a story that answers those questions, and I guarantee they’ll engage with it. This graduation video is an example of it working for us.
  4. Do less, but better. Stop posting badly-edited, shaky smartphone videos, and invest in a decent bit of kit. Even a basic camcorder on a tripod will get you better results. Look at how the most popular YouTube vloggers do it.
  5. Make paid-for promotion a part of your strategy. If your videos have a call-to-action, or you’re trying to achieve huge online consumption of your content, stump up for a bit of advertising. You don’t need a huge budget to reach new people on social, but you do need a budget.
  6. Make it for the platform it’s being distributed on. Someone looking for pretty things on Instagram wants a very different experience to someone searching and browsing YouTube.

These are principles I’ve adopted over the last few weeks, and they’re working for our social channels. During graduation fortnight we posted eight graduation-themed videos on our Facebook page, including a live broadcast from Sheffield City Hall.

Those videos generated a combined organic reach of 185,000 over two weeks, and a couple of the posts generated a ton of comments from users who wanted to share their own pride in being a Sheffield Hallam student, graduand or alumnus.

We did OK for likes, comments and shares on Twitter too.

Lastly, it’s important, as always, not to get too dazzled by the technology. As communicators, we’re sometimes driven by output, and there’s always a danger of us falling into the ‘we need a *insert output*’ trap.

So start with the goal, then move onto the audience, platform and output. Keep asking why. If you’re sure video is the right medium for the story, you’ll get a lot more out of it if you plan the video. You don’t need to storyboard it, but you should definitely think about these things:

  • Concept – what’s your ‘elevator pitch’ for the video?
  • Narrative – how is the story told? Down-the-line, over-the-shoulder, voiceover?
  • Locations – what do you know about your locations? They bring with them a whole range of challenges.
  • Pace – how many shots will you need in the edit? How fast do things move?
  • Technology – what kit do you need to make it happen?

I hope that gives you some food for thought. I’m always keen to hear how people approach video, so let me know your own tips for creating engaging video content – in the comments, or over on Twitter.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

Social media guidelines: thought leadership, getting started and (more) content

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The communications and development team on an away day hike up Mam Tor. Just because.

I’ve added a few new sections to our social media guidelines over the last week or so. (Picture unrelated – it’s me and the communications and development team on top of Mam Tor on our away day recently)

The first is about thought leadership. I’ve been speaking to a lot of colleagues recently about blogging, and its potential for raising their profiles and highlighting their expertise. It’s something that the University’s news and PR team are keen to drive forward, too.

There’s a huge crossover between social media and traditional media when it comes to thought leadership. Media outlets are always looking out for expert opinion, and we’re fortunate that we have examples of our own academics’ blogs being picked up by news media.

Hopefully this new section will allow us to develop a programme of support and training for academics at Sheffield Hallam who want to raise their profiles, promote research and network with other experts.

Sheffield Hallam's VC, Chris Husbands

A great example of someone who uses digital platforms for thought leadership: Sheffield Hallam’s VC, Chris Husbands

The second update to the guidelines is a ‘getting started’ guide. I’ve previously avoided doing this, because a lot of people at Hallam have passed the point of needing help in getting started. We’ve had lots of support from our learning technology teams and social media experts like Sue Beckingham (another great user of digital for thought leadership) in getting our social media profiles up-and-running.

But there are new developments in technology all the time, changes to the ways platforms operate (or how people use them) and some people may just be late to the party. So the ‘getting started’ guide is hopefully helpful to colleagues who are thinking of utilising social media for teaching and learning, promotion of events, student engagement or thought leadership.

There will be gaps. Communication is a huge subject, and different people want different things from their social media guidelines. And, currently, these guidelines don’t get particularly granular: there’s not a section on the difference between a Facebook page, group and profile, for example.

Maybe there needs to be. That’s why the guidelines exist in this format, instead of a Word document on the staff intranet: they can change and grow to meet the needs of the organisation.

Lastly, I’ve updated the section on content planning to include more detail. I hope it’s useful.

To round this post off, here are some general social media tips from Warwick University’s digital thinker-and-doer Dave Musson. If you haven’t met Dave, or seen him speak at an event, he’s a real expert on digital engagement, and has a genuinely collaborative approach to communications. Enjoy.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield