There is no doubt that summaries have become an important element of social media posts and an excellent way to market online. Summarizing a lengthy blog will make it easier for the reader to better understand what you’re offering or what you’re trying to say.
That’s why, most companies are more focused on quality social media marketing because half of the entire world’s population is a social media user. Companies are creating concise yet informative summaries of their long-form blog posts to achieve maximum reach.
In this article, we are going to discuss some of the most useful tips that you adopt in order to summarize blogs for social media posts.
Importance of summarizing a blog for social media post
Social media is an excellent platform for those who want to find higher visibility for their businesses. Therefore, we can say that social media is one of the key pillars of digital marketing.
But it can be difficult to keep up with all the posts that are published. This is where summarizing helps, it allows users to quickly scan through the feed. This will help the users to find what they want to read without reading each post entirely.
Not just this, summarizing also helps users to remember what was written in each post they have read because a summary provides a short (one to two sentences) yet informative overview.
However, most social media platforms have set maximum characters limit for each post. To provide you with a better understanding, we have listed different platforms along with their maximum characters limits below:
- Facebook: Facebook allows users to add 63,206 characters to a post. This is around about 9000-12000 words, BTW you won’t need that many words for writing a summary.
- Twitter: Twitter offers a maximum 280 characters limit for each post.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn has recently increased the limit of up to 3000 characters.
Overall, summarizing blogs for social media posts is important. Because it not only allows users to understand the needs of the target audience but also allows them to determine what type of content, they should create in order to support their marketing efforts.
Tips to Summarize a Blog for Social Media Post
Writing an effective summary is an excellent skill for everyone (students, or bloggers). Below, we have discussed some of the most useful tips that you can follow in order to effective summaries.
Identify the main points/ideas
A summary informs readers about what’s to come. To capture the reader’s interest, you must have to first identify the main points/ideas of your blog that you want to deliver to your reader. Nowadays, you can use the power of technology, and with the help of an AI for Google Docs, easily summarize the main points of your blog. Failing to properly identify the main points will leave the reader in confusion.
And there are also chances that he/she may opt for any other post in order to find relevant information (although your blog was also containing the same information but you have failed to properly deliver it).
However, keep in mind that you only have a few lines to convince the reader that your article contains everything that he/she is looking for.
Keep it short and simple
A few sentences are more than enough to provide important information about your blog post. This also users to quickly understand what type of content you have covered in your blog post. A short summary will also eliminate the need of reading the entire blog to understand what it contains.
In order to write a short summary, you have to only take important points while eliminating redundancies and repetitive text. If you are summarizing a long PDF, you can use a PDF AI chat in order not to read the entire blog yourself and receive a summary of it in seconds.
Apart from keeping your summary short, you should consider using simple language so that users can understand better. You can do this by replacing complex words/phrases with their most common and easy-to-understand synonyms.
Utilize summarizing tools
If you’re one thinks that keeping the summary short and simple manually is difficult for you. Then no need to worry, you can take help from online summarizing tools to get the job done. These tools work by summing up long blogs into shortened ones without going out of context. Not only this, the output content these tools provide will also be completely unique.
To provide a better understanding of how these tools work. Let us explain with an example. We will be using the summarizing tool by Prepostseo for this example. We are going to provide this tool with a piece of content in order to how effectively it summarizes it. The result can be seen in the picture below:
As you can see in the image attached above, the summarizing tool has shortened the input content by only taking the main points while ignoring repetitive words/redundancies.
Use attention-grabbing words/phrases
Attention-grabbing words are the words that are commonly used by writers and marketing experts to make their readers stop doing and just focus on what they have read or heard. These types of words are used to encourage the reader to do something such as a specific task or complete an action.
These words can be really helpful in conveying a specific message or emotion to your audience. Therefore, using these words while summarizing will increase the chances of your social posts grabbing the attention of the readers. You can use attention-grabbing words/phrases in both your content and the title of your social media posts. Want to know how? Let us explain.
Let’s say, you’re running a gaming (equipment, gaming VPS hosting, etc.) website and you have written a blog on the topic “Best gaming mouse in 2023”. Now you need to summarize and share this blog on all your social media handles in order to catch the attention of the readers/buyers.
So, while summarizing you can write the title of social media posts like “best gaming mouse to buy in 2023” or “best gaming mouse in 2023 – we have it on our website” in order to encourage the reader to open it. When it comes to using these words in the content, you can use words like “so you’ve got the idea right?” or “here is a thing”.
Leverage visuals
Aside from using attention-grabbing words or phrases, you also need to use high-quality visuals in order to make your content attractive. Leveraging visuals refers to using high-quality, informative, and yet relevant photos, videos, and infographics in your content with the main intention to provide more information to the reader.
According to constant-content, adding visuals to your content is the best way to improve your brand/service ranking in the market.
Since, here we are talking about summarizing, you can also add visuals to your blog while summarizing it. Because readers only appreciate the one whose main goal is to provide information (not just promotion of the brand/service).
By adding visuals, you can make sure that you’re putting a lot of effort in order to provide better information to your audience which will further help in building trust with your readers.
Add a call-to-action
Allowing visitors to simply move on to the next blog after they have read yours is not going to help you to rank higher in social media results. In order to gain more content visibility, you must have to ask the visitors to like, share, and or even subscribe to your newsletter service. This is where adding a call-to-action helps.
It takes minimal time, effort, and space as well but plays a huge role in the success of your online presence.
Try writing a state-based summary
Quality blogs posts contains state in them. Since in this world of internet, most blogging websites have strong social media presence. That’s why, while summarizing blogs posts for social media, websites specially focus to include states, so that reader can take interest in it.
Below, we have attached an image of popular website “Washington Post” in which the website has summarized the latest article for social media by using states. See the image for better understanding.
As you have seen in the picture above, how they have included states to catch the attention of the readers, that’s what you also need to consider while summarizing. However, try to stick the summarized social media to less than 100-words.
Overall, writing a state-based summary will allow the reader to think that you have strong knowledge about the topic which further results in increased readers trust and loyalty with your website.
Few Things You to Consider While Summarizing Blog Posts for Social Media
While summarizing there are a number of things that you must take into the consideration. Some of the major ones are as follow:
Be honest: The most important that you need keep in your mind is to be truthful. You can not claim something that you have not discussed in the blog post. Doing this can greatly harm your blog post reputation.
For instance, you should not mention solutions in the social post, if the post is about analyzing the problem. You just need to stick to the things that you have discussed in the article.
Ask Questions: Asking questions is one of the most useful to drag readers into the conversations. The main purpose of people for taking interest in a blog post is that, he/she want to know the answers of questions.
For example, you have written a blog post on “best gaming mouse” then your hook question can be “Looking for best mouse for gaming? We have it on our website”. This will allow readers to who are looking for gaming mouse or want to know about gaming mouse to quickly click on your post.
Avoid providing all the information: Final and most thing is to avoid providing all the crucial information about your post. Think about it, if your reveals all crucial points in just 50-100 words, then why the reader would take time to open and read the entire article?
So, you should only reveal necessary information which will make the reader curious about what’s inside the blog post.
Final Thoughts on a Blog for Social Media Post
In conclusion, summarizing a blog post for social media is crucial because most users are using social media for purchasing items, gaining information, solution of the problems they are facing. By summarizing the blog posts for social media, websites can attract more visitors since the summary provide a glimpse of what you have covered in the blog.
In this article, we have discussed a number of useful tips that you can try in order to efficiently summarize your blogs. However, you will only get good results if you follow the above-mentioned tips properly. Happy summarizing!