Page 77 - How to write effective business English your guide to excellent professional communication by Fiona Talbot

66 How to Write Effective Business English

There are no rights and wrongs here. This approach may not
work for all but it allows you to understand principles behind the
mindset required in writing for social media. As a checklist we
could add:

● ● Never lose sight of your objectives and your readers’ needs and
expectations.

● ● How will you adapt your tone for the demographic (sector,
culture, generation) you target?

● ● How will you get them to respond?
● ● How will you maintain interaction, as positively as possible?
● ● Are you asking the right questions? Are you getting the answers
you hope for?

● ● Who will be there to respond to their questions – or their
complaints, if any? (In social media, people expect rapid
response.)

● ● How could your communication better lead to building the
community you desire?

This chapter has shown you how companies write for these social
media platforms for different reasons. They are largely to do with
a desire to get individuals to help them get their name out there,
even go viral, to develop and maintain a good global reputation.
Just as a company needs to be responsive to customers when
writing for social media, it needs to respond by revising corporate
writing generally, as times move on. Just as business writing ex-
pressions such as ‘hereunder’, ‘the aforesaid’, ‘we remain your
obedient servants’ and so on have been ditched over the past few
decades, companies need to identify what becomes currently main-
stream. Language evolves so policies need to as well, otherwise,
once again, widely differing corporate styles can confuse readers
and work against brand.
Everything has to be consummately professional because repu-
tation matters – and it’s easy for inferior writing to go viral for all
the wrong reasons!