Ghostwriting is a key part in social media management. In this post, I’d like to dive into the entire process and share some thoughts on the key parts.
Audit
For starters, learn and audit the person’s style from old posts. Here’s a list of things worth looking at (* indicates important):
- *Tone (casual, professional, share-only): pay special attention to how the posts start: a question/ exclamation/
- *Themes (try to categorize existing posts to identify the most common themes)
- Typical length of the copy
- What are shared posts like? (Industry news, company news, job opportunities, events, etc)
- What are images like? (Screenshots, personal photos, announcement images, etc)
- What hashtags are there?
While studying existing posts, pay attention to what’s special, what’s good and what needs to change. As a ghostwriter, you don’t have to 100% imitate these existing posts. Think of biography films. Most actors interpret their roles by focusing on some key aspects, instead of delivering a 100% mock from head to toe.
Research
Look at similar accounts, especially competitors, to see what people are doing. This research serves as a reference for step 3. While browsing, you’ll probably notice that people’s styles really vary. Try to think of the reasons behind these different styles:
- Do they post like this to attract certain groups of people?
- Is this style a result of poor social management or just being personal and casual?
- Are the posts supporting their companies or simply for personal expression?
Of course, the answers to these questions are opinions, and can be biased. However, these are useful thoughts that lead you to think of what you want to achieve, and will support the development of your own social writing guidelines.
Develop guidelines for ghostwriting
The guidelines will include a lot of things, but the most important ones should be:
- Tone
- Themes
- What to exclude (especially for compliance reasons)
To make things less abstract, it’s a good idea to provide a few examples for your proposed tones and themes, and prove that you’re capable of using these tones and themes. In step 4, you may even ask the account owner to edit these examples so that they fully reflect the ideal posts.
Trial, (probably) error and discussion
The finalized guidelines will then go through necessary reviews. Some of the tasks include:
- Discuss drafts with the account owner(s), and revise the content based on their feedback
- Post regularly for 15-30 days and analyze the results to determine what works
- Recognize unusual performance caused by edits, frequent posting, and surprise factors (the first dog photo in 12 months)
Probably compliance and legal teams will also join the conversation to warn you of certain things. When you have comments from multiple people, try to identify the must-dos from could-dos (matter of taste, personal preference, etc).
Be ready for a not so smooth trial and error period. Here are the most common challenges: learning about an industry, imitating a stranger, and some back-and-forth that can be less than friendly. Someone who needs a ghostwriter is typically a guru in one industry but too busy to handle social media. Understanding this will help ease the pain caused by harsh comments like “you know nothing about my work” or “you need to improve your writing skills” or simply “I don’t like these, we’ll waste our time discussing them.”
That being said, this step requires a professional mindset. There are challenges – that’s why they need your expertise. With this in mind, it’s easier to handle the (sometimes unfriendly) feedback productively.
Set up a calendar to inform everyone of upcoming posts
These people form a team: the account owner(s), the ghost writer, and the social media manager. They should all have access to the social content calendar, in order to avoid miscommunication, which can result in repetitive posting.
Speaking of repetitive posting… It happens all the time. There was an event happening on Friday, so the social team scheduled a post for Tuesday. However, the account owner apparently didn’t know this plan, and posted her own “looking forward to this” note on Monday.
At that time there were a few options:
- Ask the account owner and social manager to remove this Monday post
- Cancel the Tuesday post because both posts would say the same thing
- Move the Tuesday post to Thursday, and slightly update the content
To save time and avoid unnecessary back-and-forth, we decided to make the changes on the social team’s end and not bother the account owner. The final decision was 3), keep both posts but add some “distance” between them by moving the later one to Thursday.
If you have thoughts to share, feel free to leave a comment! Illustrations in this post come from undraw.co
Jessspeng 