Social media allows you to improve your brand by engaging with others. Staying connected with clients or reaching out to a new audience may mean writing newsletters, articles, brief posts, or profile summaries on sites. Even if your team commits a passionate effort into the finding the right words, forgetting to proofread risks damaging your marketing efforts.

Bad grammar risks destroying credibility and reputation.

Spotting too many mistakes, especially breaking simple rules like capitalizing the wrong letters, becomes distracting. The reader may believe the persons working for the brand do not care enough to write well and conclude they don’t care about quality or their clients. Imagine a Facebook post claiming quality services containing basic grammar errors, and the post refers potential clients to an overview page on the web where grammar mistakes abound. Poor grammar risks losing sales.

In the post, “Writing for Social Media: When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People” at GrammarChic.com the author states, “bad grammar not only hinders your social media marketing efforts, it has the ability to crush any credibility or authority you may have in your respective field” and simply, “no one wants to look like an idiot.”

Brad Hoover in “Good Grammar Should be Everyone’s Business” on Harvard Business Review writes about an informal study by his company, Grammarly, of LinkedIn profiles finding a correlation between good grammar and success.

Also on Harvard Business Review in “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Bad Grammar. Here’s Why.” Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, asserts that “good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet.” People judge others by their writing. Wiens’ observation is that people who make fewer mistakes in writing also make fewer mistakes in other work. Supporting his hiring practice he states, “programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code.” Also notice in the post Wiens mentions the basics like mistaking “to” for “too” or incorrectly using “it’s.”

Your post doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to show that you care.

When it comes to informal writing, readers are forgiving. A mistake in a brief post will likely go unnoticed. Forgiveness diminishes when errors outnumber sentences, or the message becomes difficult to understand. Proofreading a short newsletter may only take a minute. You know writing basics and how to find help. Your clients know this, too.

You are passionate about your brand. Show your passion by proofreading.