Image by Drew Coffman via flickr

I appreciate that in writing about “6 Underappreciated Skills for Social Media Professionals,” Evan LePage includes writing as one of those six.

If you do social media, you spend a lot of your time writing.  Short tweets and posts, captions and comments are all important – and not without skill and design when done well – tasks of a social writer.

The obvious writing task is blogging which is generally a kind of journalism, technical writing or an essay.

As the author points out, even our growing visual networks, such as Instagram and Youtube, require titles, tags and captions and those are all important factors to getting found online and pushing engagement.

I still have to point out to people that working online also requires a lot of reading. Students in my online graduate courses who are new to that kind of learning environment are often surprised (not happily) about the amount of reading and writing required to do well.

We are becoming more and more digital, but reading and writing are not going away, though they are evolving.