Social media content differs from your typical content in the best and worst of ways. On the best side of the spectrum, you have social media content as an outlet to report injustices or other instances where media is silenced. In the worst of ways, social media content is a phenomenal tool for spreading misinformation and agendas.
Whatever your ultimate goal is (and I hope it’s not for corrupt use), your content needs to be engaging to make the desired impact. There are a bunch of methods to do so but the technique we’ll be looking into in particular is the summarizer technique. Let’s understand the technique with this engaging article.
Using Summarizing Methods To Make Social Media Posts More Enticing
What Is A Summarizer Technique?
The gist of a summarizer technique is to capture the main points of content (in this case social media). It will do so by removing fluff or unneeded stuff from the content to summarize it in your own way without discarding the key points.
There are actually two techniques that can be used to summarize social media content.
Extractive Summarization For Social Media Content
This is the bread-and-butter summarization technique. Most summarized content you’ll see on social media will be based on extractive summarization. It’s a nice and clean way of retaining original text without adding something new.
Let’s be clear about something here, social media posts especially ones containing sensitive information, tend to be of large length. People don’t have the patience to sit through 2000 words of why their favorite politician is a scumbag. A summary will suffice.
The ideal way to summarize the post would be by using a text summarizer tool. Don’t even think about summarizing by hand, trust us, it’s not worth it. Here’s a practical application of extractive summarization in a summarizer tool to create engaging content.
Practical Application
Of the two summarizing techniques we’ll be discussing today, extractive summarization is the simplest. Simplicity in this regard refers to the tool’s precision and speed. Below, we’ll be using an innovative summarizer tool that has options for both extractive and abstractive summarization.
This news article on the wife of ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle by the Guardian can be summarized to be posted on their social media this way. The tool even has the option of adding bullet points for enhanced clarity and maximum engagement.
We won’t pretend that this technique is not without its flaws that we lightly touched on above if you were reading carefully. Let’s summarize those flaws anyway, in case we weren’t clear enough.
Cohesion is a potential problem with this summary technique as well as redundancy. Lack of originality could be a problem if you feel that your social media content would benefit from a brand-new summary with new words.
With these potential shortcomings considered, let’s talk about the other method of summarizing social media content for boosted engagement.
Abstractive Summarization For Social Media Content
A tad bit more technical technique compared to the previous one but one that yields natural free-flowing results. Technical because natural language processing comes into play.
NLP doesn’t create a beat-for-beat imitation of the original text but instead improves upon it with new text. NLP is equipped to understand human language and the context behind it, the nuance. It can at times understand human language better than some humans.
Remember what we said about the 2000-word social media content about your favorite politician? Well, abstractive summarization has the unique power of making that post interesting with its human-like summarizing brought to you by NLP.
To cap off, here’s a practical application of abstractive summarization in the same summarizer tool to create engaging content.
Practical Application
Technical, complex, and precise. Three words we would use to describe abstractive summarization but those words describe the behind-the-scenes working of a summarizer tool implementing NLP.
In practice, this technique is easy to pull off using a summarizer tool for even non-technical people. In that manner, it’s just like extractive summarization before it. The reason we keep going back to the same tool is because of the ease of use it provides.
This report by UNICEF on the left about water scarcity sounds genuine and terrifying but for the local Joe reading this on social media, it’s not interesting. The summarizer tool fixed the problem with its NLP to make the report more engaging.
UNICEF can rest assured if they were to post this summarized version of the report on their social media. They will be satisfied by the outcomes on all fronts.
Conclusion
The easiest way to make social media content engaging is by going the comedy route i.e. meme posting. It’s the simplest and least complicated way. People on social media are looking for an escape from their everyday lives. Serious posts are very hard to make engaging.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way and that way is using text summarizer tools for social media content. These tools are a testament that anything can be made to be engaging with the right idea, equipment, and framing.
