Plain language for social media posts

Plain language means writing so the reader can find what they need, understand it the first time and act on it. The idea grew up in government, law and health care, where unclear writing costs people money or worse. In the United States, the Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires federal agencies to use it in documents for the public.

Social posts are a natural fit. They are short, read in a hurry and often read by people who didn't go looking for them. The habits below come from plain language guidance, adapted for a 280-character box.

Write for one reader

Picture one person reading your post: a customer on their commute, a parent checking the school's account, a developer between meetings. Write to them.

This changes small things. You stop writing "users are advised to update their applications" and start writing "please update the app". You stop explaining things that person already knows and start explaining the one thing they might not.

If your audience is mixed, picture the reader who knows the least and still matters. Experts won't mind a clear sentence.

Use "you" and "we"

Plain language guidance encourages addressing the reader directly. On social media this is close to mandatory. Compare:

Customers experiencing difficulties with password resets should contact the support team.

Can't reset your password? Reply here or DM us and we'll sort it out.

The second is shorter, friendlier and tells the reader what to do. It also sounds like a person wrote it, which on a social app is the whole point.

Prefer active verbs

In an active sentence, the subject does the action: "We fixed the bug." In a passive one, the action happens to the subject and the doer may disappear: "The bug has been fixed."

Passive sentences aren't always wrong. "Your order has shipped" is fine because the reader doesn't care who loaded the truck. But passive voice is often used to avoid saying who is responsible, and readers notice. "Mistakes were made" reads as evasive in any format.

Active verbs also tend to be shorter. "The decision was made by the board to postpone the vote" becomes "The board postponed the vote", saving 27 characters.

Cut jargon, or explain it once

Every field has words that feel normal inside it and opaque outside. Product teams say "deprecate", "GA" and "rollout". Health writers say "adverse event". Finance writers say "basis points".

Ask whether the reader would use the word themselves. If not, swap it ("we're turning off the old API on June 1" instead of "the legacy API will be deprecated"). If the term is the thing people will search for, use it once and let the sentence explain it: "Version 4 is now generally available, which means anyone can install it."

Acronyms deserve the same treatment. The first time an acronym appears in a post, ask whether every reader will know it. On a short post there is rarely room to spell it out in parentheses, so choose the version your readers already use.

Keep the structure obvious

Plain language guidance leans heavily on structure: headings, short sections, lists. Posts don't have headings, but they have line breaks.

• Put the main point first.
• Use a line break between the point and the details.
• If there are steps, put each on its own line with a number.
• Keep dates and times in a consistent, unambiguous form ("Tuesday, May 5, 3 p.m. ET").

Write for screen readers and translation

Many people meet your post through assistive technology or a translation button. A few habits help both:

• Write multi-word hashtags in camel case (#BlackHistoryMonth), so screen readers can say them as words.
• Don't use styled Unicode letters for bold or italic. They are mathematical symbols to a screen reader, and they count double on X.
• Use emoji sparingly and not in place of words. A screen reader reads each emoji's name, so "🔥🔥🔥" becomes "fire, fire, fire".
• Put emoji and hashtags at the end of a sentence rather than in the middle, where they break up the meaning.
• Add a description to images. X's composer has a field for it on each photo.
• Avoid idioms that don't translate. "Knocked it out of the park" may come back from a translation tool as something about baseball.

The W3C's tips on writing for accessibility make many of the same points for web pages, and they apply just as well here.

Skip the all-caps emphasis

Capital letters are slower to read than mixed case because every word becomes a rectangle and loses its shape. They also read as shouting, which is rarely the tone a brand or an agency wants. Some screen readers spell out short all-caps words letter by letter, as if they were acronyms.

If a word needs emphasis, move it to the start or end of the sentence, where emphasis falls naturally. Or let the fact carry the weight: "Closed Monday" doesn't need capitals to be clear. The meter's all-caps check flags three or more capitalized words, and warns more strongly when most of the post is in capitals.

Test it

Plain language guidance says to test writing with real readers, and a social post is the easiest thing in the world to test. Before an important post, show it to someone outside your team and ask what it tells them to do. If their answer doesn't match yours, rewrite.

For routine posts, the meter is a quick stand-in. A reading grade around 8 or below, no all-caps warnings, two hashtags at most and a short first line won't guarantee a clear post. But a post that fails several of those checks is usually unclear in ways a reader will feel.

A one-minute plain language pass

1. Who is the one reader?
2. What do you want them to know or do?
3. Is that in the first sentence?
4. Are there any words they wouldn't use themselves?
5. Is every verb doing something, or is the sentence passive without a reason?
6. Would it survive a screen reader and a translation button?

Most posts need two or three small edits after this pass, and almost every edit makes the post shorter.

Questions

Twittermeter is independent and not affiliated with X Corp. X changes its limits and features from time to time. If something here doesn't match what you see in the app, X's help center has the final word.