Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Words are hard.

Whether you're a published author or just getting started with blogging, it's not always easy to string words together in a way that makes sense, sounds good, and makes the reader feel something.

But every marketer should be able to write -- and, more importantly, every marketer can write. It's just a matter of finding the writing environment that works best for you, expanding your vocabulary, asking for feedback (and listening to it), and practicing. 

Luckily, there are a slew of great tools you can use to help improve your writing. Check out the list below, and feel free to add the most helpful ones you use in the comment section....

Pew Research Center, in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, wanted to explore how the rise in mobile devices impacted long-form content. Using anonymized data from Parse.ly’s database of hundreds of news and media sites, it was able to analyze this trend.

Report Findings: People Read Long-Form Content On Phones
It turns out that long-form journalism does have a place in today’s mobile-centric society.

“These findings suggest that on small, phone-sized screens the public does not automatically turn away from an article at a certain point in time – or reject digging into a longer-length news article. Instead, the average user tends to stay engaged past the point of where short-form reading would end, suggesting that readers may be willing to commit more time to a longer piece of work,” said Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s director of journalism research.

Some highlights of the report include:

• Long-form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form stories.
• Across all five distinct parts of the day, readers spend about twice the time with long-form news content on their cellphones as with short-form.
• No matter how readers arrive at specific content (through a link from an external website, social media, search, etc.), engaged time for long-form content regularly extends beyond that of short-form content.

These findings hold true even for individual digital publishers. For example, Lehigh University, a member of Parse.ly’s University Partnerships program, recently completed a study on reader engagement with long-form content. Editors at Lehigh’s student newspaper, The Brown & White, found that readers spend about the same amount of time on all pieces of content, relative to the length of an article.

Coming up with exciting content is a bit tricky though, not just because everything has already been done to death, so it’s hard to come up with anything original, but also because once you set out to create it, it seems as if everything is turning against you and wants to prevent you from creating it. You name it: procrastination (although that one is on you), writer’s block (a little bit on you), distractions, the agony of having to edit your work, the list is seemingly endless.

We've mentioned tools to help with content marketing several times at Smart Insights. We thought it worth mentioning these tools because whilst you may already be using the likes of Trello and Hootsuite, these less well-known tools may also help you be that extra bit more effective when it comes to writing content....

When you’re planning to write, but before you’re actually writing, you create an outline. Unfortunately, most outlines are worthless. You need a better outline: a fat outline.

Outlines are helpful for mapping out the structure of a long piece of writing — anything more than 1,000 words (a couple of pages). An outline ought to help the people you’re working with — your boss, your clients, your editor — to understand what you’re going to write. It should also force you, the writer, to think clearly about content.

The problem is, traditional outlines don’t do this very well.

Today, you’ll learn 9 strategies that’ll help you create highly engaging content that’ll draw your target audience in.

To create a richer experience for your audience, your content needs to impact their lives and answer their questions. It also needs to be strategically planned. Don’t be like the 70% of marketers who lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.

Let’s take a look at the 6 content writing strategies that’ll help you acquire more organic traffic....

Google has agreed to fund a project to develop automated fact checking tools amid anger over the prevalent of fake news websites during the US presidential election.

UK fact checking organisation, FullFact, has announced it has been awarded €50,000  (£43,000) by the tech giant’s Digital News Initiative to build the first  “fully automated end-to-end fact checking system”.

In a statement, FullFact explained that the system will have two main features. 

One will inform readers if something reported as fact has already been proven inaccurate.

The other mode will fact check claims automatically using Natural Language Processing and statistical analysis in real-time – something FullFact said has never been done before – by highlighting the text and having a factbox appear when the user hovers over it....

Writing isn’t a talent—it’s a skill. A skill you can develop, refine, and improve.

Becoming a great copywriter isn’t easy, but if you consistently work on your writing, your writing will get better and better.

Here are 33 (count them!) writing tweaks that will propel you to copywriting mastery....

Not sure where to start? That’s okay. This article will teach you the fundamentals. You'll learn how to drive audiences to read every word you write. You’ll learn how digital copywriters -- you know, marketers who use words to convert people online -- get and keep the most valuable commodity on the internet: attention.

However, in order to command an online reader’s attention, you have to first understand how they read.

The answer, of course, is that they’re not reading at all. On the internet, the majority of people are actually skimming. In fact, according to research performed by Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, only 16% of people online read word-by-word.

Just about everyone else is a scanner, picking text apart for the bits that are valuable to them.

Knowing that, there are several ways you can write to make the process easier for people, ensuring that your message is entirely received.

Ready to learn a valuable skill?...