Stickiness, spreadability, and editing/writing tips from our editorial staff.
Social media works best when you have both a connection strategy and a content strategy. In the past, we’ve talked about how just 5 minutes a day can do wonders to grow your connections. My personal connection strategy varies depending on what my goals are, but lately I try to: Make new connections with 2 people on LinkedIn, 1 on Facebook, 50 on Twitter, 5 on Pinterest. This gives me people who share my values and interests, but have different networks of their own. Finding the connections between people and their networks, touching base with them across multiple networks, watching as your mutual networks overlap is called interthreading.
As far as a content strategy, we went into detail on today’s call about how to create content that is both sticky and spreadable. Sticky means that people will remember it and engage with it, and will start to associate your name with your ideas. Spreadable means that it is “share-worthy” and it will be passed along to their friends. As we’ve talked about in the past, the best way to “grow a long tail” is to create a post that quickly gets to 2,000 views, and then is “out there” in social media. And the best way to do that is to create posts that are both sticky and spreadable.
Our Editorial Staff each gave some tips for self-editing and great content:
Noah: “It’s hard to underestimate the importance of individual word choice”
Joanna: “Do 3 good drafts and before handing your post to someone. Get the skeleton, put on the meat, and then make it compelling.”
Justin: “Make one point. One of the things I do with writers is work with them to identify the thesis. Sometimes it’s not even what the author thinks it is. Then I work to help make the posts lean. And I agree with Noah on individual word choice — even the sound of words is important.”
Lisa: “When editing, I edit once for clarity, once to make it interesting, and once to make it short. If a sentence takes you outside of a piece, if it makes your mind wander, or you have to struggle to understand it — it’s not the right sentence.”
Email any one of the above if you would like additional editing help for any of your posts — lisa, justin, joanna @goodmenproject.com Noah is at [email protected]
photo: a2community / flickr
My favorite new word is “interthreading”.
Interthreading is a great way to think about a network strategy. It’s no longer about “oh, I give you my business card and you file it away.” It’s about connecting, and sharing things of value, and deepening those connections over time, and layering in all of your other connections. It’s cool. I’m such a geek about it.
And funny, Justin!
“Sticky” and “spreadable” makes you the next best thing since sliced bread!