Writing messages that land

A group chat is not a newsletter. People read it on a phone, mid-conversation, between two friends arguing about something else. Everything below follows from that.

Formatting#

WhatsApp's own markers work, and so does the markdown you probably type by reflex — **bold** is converted to *bold* on the way out, ~~strike~~ to ~strike~.

Compose's toolbar wraps your selection for you.

Use bold for exactly one thing per message — usually the date or the action. Bold everywhere is bold nowhere.

Structure#

The pattern that works:

*What it is* — one line

Two or three lines of detail. When, where,
why anyone should care.

👉 What to do: https://link

Specifically:

• First line is the whole message. WhatsApp's notification preview and the collapsed chat list show roughly that much. If your first line is "Hi everyone! Hope you're all doing well!" you've spent your only guaranteed impression on nothing.
• Blank lines, not paragraphs. Two short blocks beat one dense one.
• Under about eight lines. Anything longer gets a "read more" fold and loses most of its readers.
• One action. Ask for two things and you get neither. Put the link on its own line.
• Emoji as punctuation, not decoration. One or two to mark structure, none as filler.

Links#

Paste the real URL. It's automatically rewritten into a per-group tracking link — that's what lets you see which audience clicked.

• One link per message. Two links split your click data and your reader's attention.
• Put it on its own line, at the end, after a clear instruction.
• Say where it goes. "Sign up here: " beats a bare URL, especially since the visible link will be a short one people don't recognise. On Pro you can serve links from your own domain, which measurably helps.

Personalise and vary#

Two features, one line of effort each:

Hi {groupName}! becomes "Hi Year 2 — Law!" per group. See tokens.

{Hey|Hi|Hello} everyone — tickets are {live|out now}! picks a variant per group. See message variation.

Both make your messages read like they were written to that group, and both make the outgoing text textually distinct across groups — which matters for staying unbanned.

Media#

An image with a short caption outperforms a long text message for anything visual — a poster, a venue, a menu. The caption is your text field, so the rules above still apply: first line does the work.

Don't attach a poster that contains information you didn't also write in the caption. People with images set to not auto-download see only your text, and screen readers see only your text.

Timing#

• Late afternoon and early evening beat mornings for student audiences. Check best send time for what's true of your audience rather than trusting that.
• Never send at night. Set quiet hours so a mis-scheduled send can't.
• One thing at a time. If two committees both have news this week, coordinate on the calendar instead of both sending Tuesday.

Sequencing a promotion#

For anything with a date, don't send one message — send a short ladder, and make each message different in kind:

The failure mode is sending the same announcement four times with "REMINDER!!" prepended. That's what teaches people to mute you.

Events builds this ladder for you; the event playbook shows a filled-in version.

Before you send#

• Read the delivery preview — it resolves {groupName} and shows the spun text, so it's the closest thing to seeing what a group will receive. (The test send on Numbers checks the connection, not your draft.)
• Read the first line as if it were the only thing you'd see.
• Check the delivery preview.