Using positive language in outreach

 

We send out this newsletter every two weeks, talking about how organizations and individuals can better communicate with their audience. Read the past issues. In this issue, we focus on implementing positivity in communication.

 

Surfer SEO analyzed how the emotional tone of content affects how posts rank on search engines.

 

They found that:

 

• Pages with neutral sentiment are almost non-existent at (0.26%) on search result pages.
• 12.03% of the pages are negative.
• The top 10 results for 57.6% of search result pages are only positive.

 

While there isn’t a clear correlation between sentiment and the position of content on a page (every search term should be treated individually) it still shows us that positive content has the most representation on the internet. Why?

 

Positive language:

 

• Increases optimism in others.
• Portrays the communicator as friendly, approachable.
• Decreases conflict.
• Sounds more confident.

 

This observations from conversations have carried over online.

 

Here’s what positive language looks like:

 

You can identify a negatively worded sentence through the presence of words like “don’t”, “can’t”, “shouldn’t”, etc.

 

Reframing for positivity is often (but not always) a case of removing the “not”.

 

Ex. 

 

Negative language – One mustn’t disobey the law

 

Positive language – One must obey the law

 

More examples:

Tending towards positive language in your spoken and written outreach (wherever contextually appropriate) can help get your message across.

 

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So… putting stuff into practice. That’s the hard thing, isn’t it?  

 

In this case, maybe not so much.

Being a positive person helps (the stories we tell ourselves bleed into how we behave, and how we interact with others), but positivity in written communication (social media posts, text messages, etc.) can be achieved through something as simple keeping tone in mind when reviewing marketing material.

 

See you next time,

Mukundan