Can Bad Grammar Cost You Business?

If you write a blog or manage social media platforms, then you probably spend quite a bit of time thinking up new and interesting ideas for valuable content to share with your Followers.

The 4:1:1 rule of social marketing dictates that we share 4 educational or entertaining posts for every 1 soft sell and every 1 hard sell. If all we do is sell, who would want to Follow us? So hopefully you've set up Google Alerts, you're reading your social media feeds, and you're constantly on the lookout for relevant content that will inspire your target audience to follow you and share your content with their friends. But are you inadvertently sending the wrong message with misspelled words or grammatical errors?

When the content of your post contains spelling or grammatical errors, it's almost impossible for the intrinsic value of the content to come across. Your Followers will be derailed by the mistake and the message will be lost.

We all make these mistakes, especially in the fast-moving world of social marketing, so how do you ensure that your brand doesn't become a laughingstock online?

Hire a copy editor.

If you are a small business, any added expense seems extravagant. But we see terrible, embarrassing typos and errors in content so frequently — it really is worth a small investment to make sure that this doesn't happen to you and your brand.  

An apostrophe "s" denotes ownership or a contraction. ALMOST NEVER a plural.

If you aren't completely certain which spelling of "their" to use in a sentence, or if you regularly use an apostrophe "s" to denote a plural, then you should NOT be attempting to draft blogs or social media content by yourself. You are an expert at YOUR business, and a copy editor is an expert at their business: grammar, spelling, and proper punctuation.

Typically a blogger or social media manager (whether they are in-house or working as an external contractor) will draft 30 days of content ahead of time for client approval. In that scenario, it's a simple matter of sending the content to your editor before scheduling it to go live.

Make sure that your editor checks not only the content of your posts but the hashtags as well, and any text within memes or images. If you have a social media manager who posts fresh content daily, your editor should receive a text message when posts are live, and they must have "Editor" access or logins to each platform so that copy editing can be done live as needed.

The bottom line is that the investment you make when hiring a copy editor will return massive dividends the very first time they save you from making an embarrassing mistake for all the world to see.

You simply can't put a dollar value on the respect of your brand or your hard-earned good reputation.  Not sure where to start when hiring a copy editor?  Contact us, we can help. http://TheDeptofMarketing.com