Grammar and Social Media - Yes, It Matters
In the world of social media, where LOLs, hashtags, and an endless stream of emojis are the common form of communication, you might wonder where grammar fits into your social media. Well, it still matters, and if you want to do anything on social media you need to make sure that you have proper grammar. But why?Most of the time you are working with 300 characters or less, or maybe captioning a photo or a meme, but you still need proper grammar to communicate even these small sentences. But why, why is proper grammar so important?
It Makes You Look Professional
Unless you are texting or posting while intoxicated or under the influence of something (in which case you really shouldn't be on your social media and posting wantonly). But having proper grammar makes you look very professional, especially if you are using social media to market your business.Having proper grammar even on your social media allows you to look professional to the outside world, because if you are going to be professional and well spoken when captioning an image, you are going to also be professional and well spoken in other aspects of your business.
It Gives you More Credibility
Whether you are offering condolences for a friend or sharing a post that relates to your business, good grammar allows you to get your message across and also gives you some serious credibility. Well written posts are going to be looked upon more favorably than posts with sloppy grammar, especially if they are meant to be sincere posts.
Good Grammar Shows That You Put In Effort
With autocorrect, spellcheck, and various tools like Grammarly and Quillbot's grammar checker it can be very easy to let grammar fall by the wayside. Not to say that you can’t use and take advantage of these tools, especially if you are writing all day, but you shouldn’t depend on them to do all the grammar work for you.No one grammar tool can catch every single error, and most grammar checkers are often wrong in their checks anyway depending on what you are writing and how. You might find that certain ‘misspelled words’ or caught ‘grammar checks’ are actually correct, so blindly following the grammar checker is often going to get you in more trouble than taking the time to inspect everything yourself. But if you do take this time to fix grammar errors yourself, it shows that you put effort into your post and that is appreciated by the people who read them.Additionally, by fixing the grammar errors yourself you can learn more about yourself as a writer, and can become better!
Good Grammar Respects Your Readers
You want everyone to read what you write on social media, and one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that your work looks amazing and is very easy to read. Most people aren’t on social media for very long, so you want to grab their attention and make them do something. Whether it is clicking on a link, or continuing to read an article, or just reacting to a meme and leaving a like on it.If you make your social media posts very easy to read and analyze, then people reading your post can get into the information much quicker and decide if they want to interact with your post.But you want the content of your social media to shine, and your readers aren’t going to get to that if they need to wrestle through countless grammar errors. Instead, they will skip over your content and get right back to something they can actually read.
Grammar is Just as Important as Content
While most social media, whether it is for marketing or for fun, is focused heavily on content, you can’t ever forget all about grammar and making your work very easy to read. So even if you are just posting a simple sentence, make sure to either run it through a grammar checker or give it a once over right before you hit the post button. Because having proper grammar is going to be very important as you use social media, no matter what you use it for.And if you think it isn’t, then look at the plethora of social media posts that don’t have proper grammar and see how you feel about them! They probably aren’t the type of posts that you want to interact with, and your readers are going to feel the same way about yours! With the constant number of posts that get added to social media, you need to do everything you can to get your posts noticed, and proper grammar is one of the biggest factors that you have some control over, so take advantage of it!