Content production as a brand has come to include a wide-variety of content - from written to video, created to curated. Additionally, advances in search have made some of the mediums such as photo or video more attractive from the standpoint of SEO.
However, writing and text-based content is still highly valuable. Since writing is a large part of what we do here, we use the term “social writing” to describe what we do for clients. Our definition of social writing is as follows:
“Content, primarily in written format, that is designed to be optimal for social sharing.”
Optimal: This means that it’s made to be search-friendly, using well-known and emerging trends in SEO marketing such as keywords, effective titling and various other techniques.
Social Sharing: This is an important part of what we do. Olivier Blanchard wrote a great piece on marketers as spammers, and this is exactly what we hate about some digital writing. The “social” part of writing, to us, means that it has value (information, storytelling, emotion, etc), that people want to share it with others, and, from a technical standpoint, you’ve made it easy for them to do so.
These two things combined make effective online content in written form, and both are necessary to get there. If looked at separately, a piece that’s merely “optimal” runs the risk of becoming spammy and you could lose the trust of your readers. A piece that’s merely focused on value misses the opportunity to be more search engine friendly.
What do you think? Are there other equally as important pieces of writing for the digital age?
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