Content Writing For Social Media with James Ogunjimi

James Ogunjimi is a radical Nigerian who believes in the power of words to effect change. He writes poems, essays, shorts stories and political op-eds. In 2013, his poem: “Listen to the Whirlwind” was named “Poem of the Year” by the International Community of Poets (ICOP). In 2015, his poem, “Humanity’s Call” was second runner-up in the February edition of the Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest. His short stories, opinion pieces, and poems have appeared in Sahara Reporters, Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper amongst many other publications.

Below is a summary of the interview Content Writing For Social Media with James Ogunjimi

James is a hype man and the lead noise maker responsible for making the public aware of what a business is offering on social media. He says a content creator is someone who creates or writes for brands or businesses. He creates the audience's needs in mind, he sells the product by appealing to the audience. You have to understand how to write from different perspectives and the different forms of writing. James has been writing for 6years and one of the challenges he encountered while writing is people disagreeing and challenging some of the content you come up with.

He says to create a good write-up, there must be a good headline to grab the attention of the reader’s attention, humans have a very short attention span and if you can’t interest them within the first 5 seconds, they’d pass your post by. Writing for social media is different from writing for any other medium, there are certain mechanics and strategies that should be employed for it to be successfully done. To easily attract attention, you should have a very catchy first line and it should be structured for the target audience.

James says the only way to make people interact with your content is by being consistent with the kind of content you put out. Your followers gravitate to you because they expect a certain kind of content from you, give this content in creative ways. Facebook as a platform supports longer captions, Instagram uses hashtags mostly, twitter is more limited and for career paths, LinkedIn works better. You just need to know how to utilize these different platforms to your benefit.

He said when taking up a writing job some of the things to ask are, what they want to achieve, what medium would they prefer to use, would a website be necessary, and many more. The best way to caption content on the internet is by taking a more conversational route. He reveals that video content is gaining more traction than any other because it is easier to watch something with your own eyes than reading about it.

James advises that when handling the social media accounts for a brand or business, you must have a content calendar to help you remember when and what to post. Even personal accounts can try this so they can consistently put out content and gain traction.

A caller asked about how to get inspiration to put content out on a blog, James said your blog should be something you are passionate about because once you like doing something, you’d consistently be on it. If you find it hard to come up with ideas, he says you should search up the latest trends on whatever topic you’re writing about. You can also use google to search up topics that people are searching for. Search up keywords and create ideas around them, also use these keywords in your title so that whenever people search up the word, your post will be one of the first to pop up.

Concluding, he says the major change he noticed in his field is the rise of video creation and he advises that people utilize this medium in their content creation. He ended saying originality is key and always write from different perspectives.