Social Media with Smillew is better than social media without Smillew

How To Write Witty Replies on Social Media

Trust me, I’m a certified liar

Unless you have a name or 1 million followers, your problem on social media is that nobody trusts you. People have no idea who you are and don’t understand why they should give you any credit.

In bar interactions, an easy way to build trust is to have a wingman.

The role of the wingman is to prove you’re not a sociopath (you have at least one friend) and to brag about your top qualities because you’re too modest to do so yourself.

It’s also easier to deal with rejection because you didn’t face it directly, and the wingman doesn’t care as much.

Wingmen also work on social media where they’re the first to reply to one of your posts. A classic LinkedIn strategy (or any other social media) is to have a group of trusted friends who will like and reply quickly to anything you post.

I recommend having a WhatsApp group or equivalent.

But, sometimes, you’re alone, and you need to build credibility by yourself. That’s where copywriting tricks come into play. They’re also called psychological manipulation. Or marketing.

The most effective trick is to begin your comments with one of these keywords:

• “I read that”
• “I heard that”
• “From what I learned,”
• “From what I saw,”
• etc.

And then you add your comment. It’s like having a wingman except that everything is in your head.

The big difference is that now there’s another party involved (implicitly). It’s not (apparently) only your opinion. It’s one you’re sharing.

That’s very different.

If you say something directly, it’s suspicious.

But if you share something someone else said, people will assume the other person is trustworthy (more than you in any case) because that’s what humans do and because you’re “social proofing” the value of their opinion by sharing it.

One could even argue (I know I could) that it’s not lying. For example, “I heard that” is true because I just said it out loud before posting it. If you want to be honest, you could use my favorite technique and start your comment with, “From what I just made up.”

A recent example from X (Twitter)

In this clip, taken from a security camera, a woman steals an Amazon package from a porch and runs towards a car with it. She throws the package inside the car but doesn’t manage to get in herself, and the car drives away without her. In the meantime, the owners come out, chase her, and catch her.

My reply was:

“I read that the driver did it on purpose. He got the package And got rid of her. Win/win”

The original post got 5.8 million impressions, and my reply got 103k views and 1.8k likes. It’s more than 1% of the original post, which is good from my experience. It’s not possible to get more than 5% from what I saw. (Let me know if you have an example.)

Here’s one (great) reply with 4%.

Conclusion

From what I read in this study from the Institute for Social Media Research, the “social proof” technique is the most efficient to maximize the views on your social media replies.

However, if your goal is to maximize the number of replies, other techniques work better. My favorite is the so-called willful ignorance.

I hope you liked this social media lesson, and I invite you to try it on your favorite platform. Feel free to share your results in the comments — I’m always happy to see my readers succeed.

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