This is a seven-part series on how people working for businesses can create consistently good web and social media content.

I’m going to assume you already know the who, where, and why:

who your target audiences are;
the most appropriate channels (websites, intranets, social networks) to talk to them on; and
what your communications objectives are.

Contents (tl;dr)

I’ve organised my guidance into seven checklist items, the first of which I’ll cover in this post:

1. Keep it easy

Make it easy for your audience to understand and follow your content. They shouldn’t have to figure out what you’re trying to say.

Here are three ways to do that.

1a. Front-load important words

Make your point at the front of your sentence or paragraph. People skim the first few words of sentences and paragraphs, particularly when they’re reading on a screen. If you don’t grab your audience’s attention straight away, they won’t read your post.

Let’s look at an example. Here’s post from a user on LinkedIn:

Months ago when I moved to Toronto, I was being told by recruiters and companies that I wasn’t good…see more

Have you noticed how most social networks don’t display the full text a post, forcing people to click the “…see more” link if they want to keep reading? This makes it even more crucial that you make your point up front – before the ‘fold’, so to speak.

Here’s the expanded view of that post:

Months ago when I moved to Toronto, I was being told by recruiters and companies that I wasn’t good enough for them or that I didn’t have any Ontario experience.
Today, I’m in the Bahamas for our annual conference leading the HR function across 17 countries for an amazing company owned by the largest advertising agency in the world.
Don’t let other people’s insecurities and skewed metrics of success become your reality!

Which part of that post do you think is most important?

I think it’s the last paragraph. If I could rewrite that post, this is what I’d say – with the important bit (which I’ve put in bold) moved to the beginning:

Don’t let other people’s insecurities and skewed metrics of success become your reality! #StoryTime
Months ago when I moved to Toronto, I was being told by recruiters and companies that I wasn’t good enough for them or that I didn’t have any Ontario experience.
Today, I’m in the Bahamas for our annual conference leading the HR function across 17 countries for an amazing company owned by the largest advertising agency in the world.

The entire first sentence fits before the “…see more” text break on LinkedIn and, more importantly, gets immediately to the crux of what the author is trying to say.

And now that the audience knows what the author is trying to say, the #StoryTime hashtag tells them they can expand this post to read a story that exemplifies the point.

1b. No time for small talk

Don’t include small-talk text in your content. Reading that text is almost always a waste of time for your audience.

Small-talk text – sometimes called throat-clearing text – is the text you see at the top of web pages or at the start of blog and social media posts. (Did you notice that I didn’t have any at the start of this post?)

Here’s an example of useless introductory text on a company’s ‘About us’ webpage. Can you guess which Australian company this is from?

Over our long history, our social purpose and commitment to the community has remained the same; to create connections and opportunities that matter to every Australian.

That text could be talking almost any Australian business, right? You learn almost nothing about the business from it, and I think being forced to read it is a waste of time your time.

That text, by the way, is from the Australia Post website.

Compare it to what New Zealand Post have at the top of their ‘About us’ webpage:

We provide customers with the solutions and products to help them communicate and do business.

That’s more useful. But honestly, as far as intro text on ‘About us’ pages is concerned, we can do even better.

You know what the US Postal Service have at the top of their ‘About us’ page? Nothing. Instead of text telling people what they do, they have links and icons showing people what they do.

So don’t waste your reader’s time with needless filler text, just let them get on with what they’re there to do.

1c. Make content skimmable

Help time-poor people skim your content. Why? Because most people don’t carefully read content online, they merely skim it. (At least till they find what they’re looking for; though even then they might not read it carefully.)

Here’s how you can make life easier for people looking at your content:

Don’t use big blocks of text: split your text into paragraphs (the shorter the better, in some situations)
Use lists whenever you can (bulleted or numbered lists, as required)
Use lots of headings
Use emphasis (eg colour, bold text) to draw your audience’s eyes to text that’s important

If you want to really take things up a notch: use descriptive headings. The most effective news articles on the web are the ones you can get the gist of just by reading the headline and subheadings.

Here’s an example of how we made content skimmable at my current job. We wanted to take a paper that one of our engineers presented at the Australasian Tunnelling Conference and convert that to a Medium.com article.

This is a paragraph from that conference paper:

The ability to deliver spoil to the Hornsby Quarry provided NorthConnex tunnelling sites more certainty on haulage turnaround times and dramatically reduced the total kilometres travelled for spoil disposal. Beyond the obvious financial benefits of a short haulage route, this helped to reduce the risks associated with haulage delays and enabled more efficient removal of spoil from the tunnelling sites, which mitigated one of the risks linked with delivery of the tunnelling program.

And here’s how we made that skimmable for posting to Medium.com:

Beyond the obvious financial benefits of a short haulage route, the advantages of using this site included
• dramatically reduced total kilometres travelled for spoil disposal,
• reduced risks associated with haulage delays,
• more certainty on haulage turnaround times, and
• overall more efficient removal of spoil from tunnelling site.

See how much difference you can make just by adding bullet points and putting text in bold?

Keep it easy: recap

Let’s recap how you can make your audience’s life easier:

Make your point quickly: front-load important words
Don’t give them useless text to read: no time for small talk
Add structure to your text that makes it easy to read on a screen: make content skimmable

There’s lots more you can do, of course. But I think this is the bare minimum.

Next in the series

On to ‘Keep it short’…