How to write social media ad copy

Social ad copy is read second. The picture or the first second of the video stops the thumb; the copy then has about one line to say what this is and why it is worth a tap. Everything past roughly two lines on a phone sits behind the word more, and most people never open it. So write the first line as the whole advertisement, and treat the rest as the part that convinces the people who are already interested.

The first line is the advertisement

Not a greeting. Not the brand name, which is already in the handle above. Not a question the reader has to answer in their head.

The first line should carry the specific thing: what it is, for whom, and the one number that matters. "Two-bedroom flats off Kanakapura Road, possession in March" works. "Looking for your dream home?" does not, because it asks for effort and gives nothing back.

The headline, the short field under the picture, is cut even harder because the call-to-action button sits beside it. Keep it to a handful of words and never repeat the first line there. Say the offer in one and the proof in the other.

The picture carries its share of the words too. Video autoplays without sound, and a fair share of people never turn it on. If the argument lives in the voiceover, it does not exist.

So the claim goes into the frame as text, sized for a phone held at arm's length, in the safe area away from the top and bottom edges where the platform draws its own buttons. The caption then adds the detail, the conditions and the address rather than repeating the line on the picture.

Comments are the second page of the ad

This is the part that separates a social ad from every other medium. Your advertisement is a post, so it collects comments, and everybody the ad reaches later sees them.

Under a good ad, thirty people ask the price, the location or whether you deliver to their area. Those are enquiries. Unanswered, they sit there as proof that the business does not reply, in front of the next ten thousand people the ad reaches.

Decide before the campaign starts who answers, in what voice, how fast, and what the standard reply is for price questions. Then check the comments on the ad itself, not only the page, because ad comments live in a different place and people miss them for weeks.

Copy written for months, not for Sunday

An always-on ad set runs for as long as it pays. Copy with "this Sunday only" in it is a lie by the third week and a reason for somebody to stop trusting you.

Keep dated offers in their own campaign with a hard end date in the calendar, and keep the evergreen sets free of any time claim. If the offer has conditions, put the real ones in the caption. A condition discovered at the counter costs you the sale and gets written into a review.

Write versions that argue differently

Give the platform four or five of these per ad set and it will find the one your buyer responds to. Give it five rewordings of the same sentence and it learns nothing, and you have wasted the only test social media gives you for free.

What the platform will not let you say

Ad policies are strict about copy that implies knowledge of the reader. A question such as "struggling with hair fall?" is written about the person and gets rejected, where the same claim written about the service clears. Before and after pictures, outcome promises and money claims are the other three that catch Indian advertisers most often.

Clinics, coaching centres and finance businesses carry a second layer on top of the platform's rules, set by their own regulator or council. Get that wording from your compliance adviser once and reuse it, rather than rewriting it under deadline for each campaign.

The first WhatsApp message is part of the copy

Most Indian social ads that produce enquiries end in a chat, not on a website. So the pre-filled message the ad puts in the person's WhatsApp is a line of ad copy, and it is the one owners never write.

Fill it with the thing they tapped on. "I saw the ad for the dining range, please send prices" arrives with the context attached, and whoever answers knows what to send. A blank chat window arrives as "hi" and somebody has to start the conversation from nothing.

Then write the first reply before the campaign goes live, along with the two questions that always come next. An ad that runs at nine at night and gets answered at eleven the following morning has paid for a stranger's attention and let it cool.

Where the tap ends on a website instead, the same rule holds. Whatever the first line promised is the first thing the page must say, in the same words and the same rupee figure. A reader who tapped on flats off Kanakapura Road and lands on a project list has been asked to do your filing.

For example, a furniture showroom running an ad about a dining range should land the tap on that range, with the price shown in the ad, and the showroom timings under it. Same offer, same number, same words.

What to do next

Take your current ad, cover everything after the first line, and read what is left. If a stranger cannot say what you sell and why it is worth a tap, the copy has not started yet. Rewrite that one line, write four versions that argue differently, and put somebody's name against answering the comments.

Writing and rebuilding these sets is what our performance advertising creatives work does month to month. If you are already spending on Meta and cannot say which enquiries came from which ad set, the tracking is the problem rather than the copy, and that is one of the first things the free audit looks at.