Contents (tl;dr)
Share emotion < you are here
5. Share emotion
If you want your web and social media posts to perform well, they have to sound like they’re a person talking to a another person.
Talk like a person, not like a business
Look at this tweet from Roads Australia:
Our CEO, Michael Kilgariff, visited the @WestGateTunnel site this week. Standing by the ramp site for the Tunnel Boring Machine are Construction Manager - Tunnels Andrew Shepherd, Transurban’s Anita Orr, Michael, and Transurban’s Camden Gilchrist. #Transurban
Photo showing four people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing in a line in front of a large dug up area that looks like a construction site with large metal support structures.
That doesn’t read like a person talking to another person. It reads like a company trying to talk to a person. In fact, that text is more like a caption on a photo than a story being told about the visit these people took to that construction site.
Compare this to an almost identical tweet from Infrastructure Partnerships Australia:
Ever seen a tunnel boring machine being constructed? We did, thanks to @TransurbanGroup giving us a backstage pass to its Northern portal dive site for the @WestGateTunnel. This event is part of our new network series #MembereXperience.
Photo showing twelve people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing in a group in front of what looks like an industrial area. Behind them are stacks of large shipping containers.
Now that sounds more like a person talking to a person. The photo itself isn’t great, but at least the text tells the story.
Actually, those folks went one better: their tweet included multiple photos so you got a better idea of what the visitors did and saw while they were there.
How do you write posts like this? Pretend you’re telling this story to someone from another business at a networking event. And if the story you’re telling isn’t boring, that level of informal storytelling should also let some of your emotions come through in the text.
All that said, please don’t take and share photos of people standing in a group like in the two big photos above. These types of photos don’t tell the reader anything about the experience the people had at that event or location. And most readers won’t know – and, importantly, won’t care – about who the people in that photo are. Posts with photos like this are almost always bad and you should not share them.
Use hashtags to share emotion
Sometimes it takes the smallest change to make an otherwise good post work better. Here’s an example from WorkSafe Victoria on LinkedIn:
Today is #WorldMentalHealthDay. Most employers already know that mental health in the workplace is important, but the challenge is knowing where to start and what information to rely on.
<link to their website with relevant resources>
Now that post is good, but I think it could be improved significantly by adding a single hashtag:
Today is #WorldMentalHealthDay. Most employers already know that mental health in the workplace is important, but the challenge is knowing where to start and what information to rely on. #TakeCareOfYourPeople
<link to their website with relevant resources>
See how much of a difference adding just a little bit of emotion makes? Try to do that with your posts.
Proficient users of hashtags can tell a whole second story (sometimes a behind-the-scenes anecdote, sometimes even an entire emotional arc) by adding just a couple of hashtags to their posts
Beware the Facebook algorithm
Most social media platforms will use an algorithm to decide which posts to show to which users, and in what sequence. It’s important to remember that these algorithms tend to follow community stereotypes.
For example, the business I work for posted this ad on Facebook about child car seat safety:
Screenshot of a Facebook sponsored post (ie ad) by Transurban. The text of the post reads “Nearly half of us use child car seats incorrectly, according to research by our road safety partner NeuRA - Neuroscience Research Australia. This increases the risk of injury to children by almost three times. Follow this checklist to ensure your child restraint is installed correctly in your car.” Included in this post is a video, the thumbnail of which shows, side-by-side, the correct and incorrect way in which to connect a car seat tether strap to an anchorage point.
Since we’re an infrastructure/engineering/technology business, Facebook’s algorithm decided that it would show this post mostly to men. When I looked at the stats, I found that only 8% of the people Facebook showed this post to were women. This is despite the fact that over 40% of our Facebook page’s followers are women.
We had to work against Facebook’s algorithm to show our post to equal numbers of men and women. To do that we published two identical ad posts: one targeted at just men, one targeted at just women; and then we put twice as much money behind the ad targeted to women. It was only then that our eventual impressions numbers were roughly equal.
So make sure your post is reaching the audience that it will resonate with the most. And remember that you may have to fight algorithms and community stereotypes to achieve this objective.
Share emotion: recap
Let’s recap how you can share emotion in your posts:
Write your posts like you’re talking to a colleague at a networking event: talk like a person, not like a business
If you can’t add emotion directly, try adding it indirectly: use hashtags to share emotion
Make sure your posts are reaching the audiences that it will resonate with the most: beware the Facebook algorithm
Just keep in mind that adding genuine emotion to your posts (and not just a random exclamation marks or emoji here and there) is a skill that will take time and practice to develop.
Next in the series
On to ‘Post quickly’…