Writing vs. Speaking: Knowing the Audience

This week, I attended a professional development luncheon with the Raleigh Public Relations Society to hear Lisa Luten speak. For those of you who don’t know, Lisa Luten is the Director of Communication (and part time comedian) for the Wake County Public School System. This woman is hilarious! Lisa is best known for her work as one of the many voices behind @WCPSS, the famous Twitter account for the school system.

If you do not follow this account – stop reading this and click here.

The account has received national media coverage for their hilarious tweets that are sarcastic, funny, and completely the opposite of anything you would expect from a government twitter account. Their most famous coverage was from a Wake County student who created a Buzzfeed article that went viral causing the account’s followers to skyrocket to nearly 50,000.

So what exactly is it that makes this account so amazing and hilarious? Lisa did a great job educating everyone in attendance – the answer is very simple and something we all know:

Focus on your target audience, learn their language, and speak to them accordingly.

It is easy to hear this and write it off because so often we feel we are already accomplishing it. However, this task, especially to agency people, may become slightly harder to maintain as client language begins to blur together.

Lisa explained the message simply by saying there are two ways people communicate – talking and writing. Most people speak to their followers on social media in their “written” language. This is formal, factual and often boring. The point? Social media lingo isn’t supposed to sound like a press release.

Again, this may seem like common knowledge, but so often it is easier to speak in facts than to really consider your audience and understand how they speak and what they’re talking about.

Who is the target audience of the @WCPSS twitter? Easy, the 100,000 students who are in the Wake County Public School System. That’s the very reason their twitter uses the newest lingo and starts hashtags asking kids to send them #TeacherSelfies.

Although maybe not the first time hearing this advice, it is always a great reminder to really consider who is reading your social media content – and how they would best interact and respond to it. We may not all have as much flexibility in our client accounts to do something so unique, but consider trying a few things to appeal to the specific audience.

Lisa’s advice? When you don’t know if it’ll work – try it out! The best thing about social media is you can typically tell if people resonate with the post pretty quickly.