For about five or six years, I have blogged for Creativepool. During that time, I’ve written 254 blogs, most of which I hope have been either interesting or amusing, informative or insightful. Some will have been more of one than the other, of course. In fact, I was surprised which one was my most successful of 2015 so far. It was “Read ‘em and weep: top 10 worst corporate phrases”. It got thousands upon thousands of hits not only on Creativepool’s website, but also hundreds of comments on LinkedIn and other forums. If you missed it, you can read it by clicking here. It’s a good coffee break read, I’m told. Just make sure you aren’t within chortling distance of your boss…
Anyway, I mention this because, at the time, I was surprised at how much people engaged with my article. But with hindsight, perhaps it’s not so hard to understand. It was successful because:
A) People like to laugh, and very often at the expense of others (You’ve Been Framed and a good half of Facebook updates are based upon this whole premise)
B) Everyone likes a good moan now and again
C) Comments breed comments; so when someone weighs in with their own two cents’ worth, others follow in droves.
There may well be a D and an E (and even an F and a G), but people also like to think in threes, so let’s leave it there.
But as a freelancer, and especially as someone who runs a copywriting consultancy, I have very little time to devote to social media. We’re all told that social media is the way forward in terms of engagement, but frankly I’m so short of time doing the work itself that I can rarely section off some time for composing interesting (or pithy) tweets.
Quick! Tweet before someone forgets you exist!
It seems to me that there is some sort of panic in the world where unless you’re cropping up in people’s timelines every minute of every hour of every day, you’re not going to make an impact. Is that true? I don’t know how to measure that, but I’d be interested to know. So if you do know, please tell me. I mean, look; I get quite a lot of work but I only tweet fairly sporadically. The client has to come first and I doubt they’d be very impressed if I spent time tweeting when I should be trying to hit their deadline (or even better, delivering their copy before the deadline). So if I’m getting social media wrong, I must be doing something else right.
There seems to be an ethos of “Quick! Communicate before someone doesn’t think about you or your company for a nanosecond!” But realistically, I’m not even sure what I could tweet on an hourly basis that would make much difference. I know some copywriting agencies do, and – to be fair – the tweets of theirs that I’ve found time to read are interesting and worth reading – even if they’re often clickthroughs to quite old articles.
Feel free to educate me
Perhaps they employ a fresh-faced, social media-savvy graduate who can churn these out at a rate of knots. But do they actually make a difference to the company’s standing in the industry?
I’m sure any social media guru (blurgh! HATE that word!) worth their salt would be able to tell me why I should tweet more. If that’s you, please do go ahead and tell me in the comments section below. But for now, I’m going to stick with getting the work done.
Ashley is a copywriter, editor and blogger
