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Should I Create Multiple Twitter Accounts?

A personal branding question I’m regularly asked by authors, artists, and other creative types is whether someone should have multiple Twitter accounts. In fact, someone posted that very question to an audio theater Facebook group I belong to:

Looking for opinions regarding Twitter: Is it better to have separate accounts for each show you’re creating, or just one main company account that posts on behalf of all shows? I’ve seen it both ways so I was interested in seeing which way people like more.

Well, to start with, you may have seen it both ways, but those “more than one account” people are probably wrong. I’ve seen people run red lights, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should do it.

I’ve seen people create Twitter accounts for movies, TV shows, books, plays, and any other creative venture you could name. People get excited about a project, and they want to build some buzz around it, so they create social media accounts around that one project.

That’s not the best way to go about things, because those projects typically have a short life, which means the Twitter accounts do, too. Then, the creators are off onto another creative venture, creating yet another social media account.

So let me just say this: Create a single account for yourself or your creative group as the brand. Focus all your energy into building that account.

A juggler standing on a large ball juggling three colorful balls. An apt metaphor for having more than multiple Twitter accounts.Think of your favorite actor. Don’t you follow them through their variety of performances? Wouldn’t it be a pain in the ass if you had to re-find them for each character they played? Every time a show or movie ends, you have to wait to find out what their next role is, follow them, and soak in all the goodness, until that role ends. And then you repeat the process.

Think of how painful that would be if your favorite musician launched a new Twitter account every time they recorded a new album.

Can you imagine how much of a time waster it would be if your favorite painter created a Twitter account for every new painting they did? Bob Ross would have created 403 Twitter accounts just for his show paintings, although the actual number may be closer to 30,000.

It’s About Your Personal Brand

You’re better off focusing your energy and efforts on building your personal brand, or your troupe’s brand because that’s the thing people are interested in. Just like you have your favorite performer that you follow from project to project, people will follow you along your creative journey as well. They don’t start and stop with each project, they’re with you every step of the way.

Spend your time building an audience for your group, getting people emotionally invested in that account, and coming to rely on it for news and information about what you’re doing. Have conversations with people with that account, so people are more likely to like and trust it.

Imagine putting all that time and energy into a project account, only to have to repeat the effort several months later. And then doing it again a year after that.

You would have to repeat the brand-building exercise over and over, trying to re-convince your audience from the last show to join you on the new account, and then re-re-convincing them on the one after that. And the next one. And the next one.

By having an account that spans for years, you can even give your new fans a look at your old history as they look back to see what else you have done. As your account grows and ages, people can take a retrospective look at your catalog of work, which they can’t do if you only have a Twitter account that lasts for a year or two.

Photo credit: Mariamichelle (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Develop Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

Several years ago (in the pre-social media days), I was the director of sales and marketing for a software company. My job was to promote our software and to make sure that people, organizations, and state governments bought it.

I was in charge of trade shows, the website, brochures, press releases, and so on, not to mention selling the product all over the United States, as well as other parts of the world. I was making sales calls, traveling, designing, and doing things the sole marketing person in a company does. These were my strengths, and they were the reason I was hired.

Which is why my boss said I should develop my customer support skills.

“Why would I do that?” I asked. “I don’t do customer support.”

“I just think it’s important that you strengthen your customer support skills, since you don’t do it very often.” He added, “I may even have you start learning some coding.”

“So will the customer support team learn how to work trade shows and create brochures?”

“No, why would they do that?” he said, completely seriously.

His rationale was that, since I didn’t have strong customer support skills and I didn’t know how to code, I needed to learn or improve these skills.

It's important to get better at your strengths, rather than trying to improve your weakest areasI asked him if it wouldn’t be smarter for me to just focus on getting better at marketing or graphic design, and he said he didn’t think that was as important. I needed to be well-rounded and well-versed in everything the company did. (I was also the only one in the entire company that he thought needed to be this well-rounded.)

Your Strengths Make You Money, Not Your Weaknesses

I see a lot of companies make this mistake, whether large or small. They think they and their employees should be jacks- and jills-of-all-trades. Everyone should be a generalist. Everyone should know how to do everything. As a result, no one is great anything, they’re all just mediocre at a lot of things.

(It’s no surprise that these companies are not leaders in their industry.)

The pressure to be a generalist is especially high for entrepreneurs. We often have to do everything because there is no one else.

That pressure wastes more time and kills more businesses because we spend all our time doing the things we’re not good at, which takes us away from our strengths, which is how we make our money.

The dentist who spends four hours a week handling her bookkeeping and staffing requirements is missing four hours of billable time. That’s four hours’ worth of patients she’s missing out on. And if she tries to do her administrative stuff in the evenings and on the weekends, that’s just cutting into personal time, which wrecks her work-life balance, which is the whole reason she started her practice in the first place: to have a fulfilling personal life.

The bookstore owner who spends an hour or two a day handling his inventory and fulfilling ecommerce orders is losing the time spent dealing with face-to-face customers. To solve the problem, he’ll end up hiring someone to help deal with customers when he should really hire someone to fill orders and count inventory.

The consultant who spends three hours each week researching possible new clients instead of actually dealing with client work is losing 156 hours of productivity per year (3 hours x 52 weeks/year = 156 hours). That’s nearly an entire month of time wasted on not creating products or writing reports that help him get paid. In effect, he only worked for 11 months in a year.

In all of these cases, the business owner is spending time doing the things they don’t really need to be doing. Instead, they’re doing things that take time away from the things they should be doing. Their weaknesses are sapping their strengths and they’re losing money.

And instead of trying to solve that problem, they’ll find ways to improve their skills in that weak area. The dentist will invest in bookkeeping software and watch videos on how to use it. The bookstore owner will get better ecommerce software (and learn how to program it), and work to streamline the shipping process. The consultant will invest in business databases or lead gen software and spend more time writing the content needed to bring in new clients.

This is a terrible waste of time, and we need to stop it. This is where it makes sense to hire someone else to do the things we’re not good at.

The dentist can hire a bookkeeper to manage the books for 4 hours a week. The money she spends will be a lot less than the money she makes in seeing patients for 4 hours.

The bookstore owner can hire a college kid to handle the shipping and inventory. Let them streamline the process for you and figure out a way to make it more efficient, then they can teach it to the bookstore owner.

The consultant can hire a virtual assistant to do all the client research for him, even setting his sales appointments.

Don’t spend time or money trying to develop your weak skills. Hire someone whose strengths fill your weak areas so you can focus on getting better at the things that make you money. Try to become one of the best at the thing you do. Get great at your strengths, not slightly better at your weaknesses.

If you’re a writer, take writing classes or read books on writing. If you’re a graphic designer, watch design videos and practice on pet projects. If you’re a dentist, go to conferences and take continuing education classes. If you own a bookstore, focus on your customers and finding new ways to bring people into your store.

For the things you’re weak at, hire a professional to get it done. Hire the graphic designer whose work is continually growing. Hire the writer who creates great work. Work with the consultant who produces great results for their clients.

Trying to strengthen your weaknesses, especially those so completely unrelated to the thing you actually do, is a colossal waste of time and can have a negative effect on the growth of your company. Get better at what you’re good at and you can charge more and work less.

Photo credit: Stocksnap (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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A Quick and Dirty Editorial Calendar

One of the things that have always irritated me about social media marketing is the near-fetishization of the editorial calendar.

I’ve known companies that have scripted every single tweet, Facebook update, Instagram photo, and blog article for an entire year, dictating the date and time each message will go out, and color-coding it to product launches, corporate events, and phases of the moon.

And I’ll admit to more than a little schadenfreude when those year-long schedules were derailed by some corporate crisis, takeover, merger, or product cancellation.

I’ve never understood the fascination of such strict, rigorous scheduling because it’s so easily disrupted, but I like the idea of general guidelines. Just a few recommendations to keep me on the right path, not a step-by-step, turn-by-turn map of the route I have to take.

As I like to say, “Just tell me where I need to go, I’ll figure out how to get there myself.”

So here’s a way to make a quick and dirty editorial calendar.

A sample editorial calendar for social media and content marketing.

  1. To start, create a spreadsheet on Google, Excel, or Numbers. Label the days of the week, and create enough lines for your posts for each day. The example above has three posts per day.
  2. Color code the alternating weeks by hand. Don’t use the application’s alternating rows command because it doesn’t let you group them this way. (At least I haven’t figured out how to do 2 or 3 rows at a time without screwing up the header..)
  3. Put the dates to the right of the block.
  4. Put a row below the month, and put the Topic Of The Day in each cell. If you’re going to run a daily theme, spell it out here. If you want a weekly theme, put it to the right, next to the dates column.
  5. You can also drop hashtags into each cell. In the sample calendar above, I could drop in #contentmarketing in every Monday spot, #language in every Tuesday spot, and so on. This gives you a little more flexibility to label each post and keep a running theme. For example, for one client, I post a funny little picture on Instagram at 3: 15 every afternoon. (You can see Marcel and his crazy little adventures here.)
  6. Do a Google News search for your particular keyword or hashtag. Start scanning the stories and open up each one that seems to fit what you’re looking for. Do a quick read through and then copy the headline and the URL and paste it into the cells. Helpful tip: Don’t go to news.google.com, because their selection of articles is rather limited. Instead, do a general search and then click the News button at the top of the page. Then select the Recent menu, and choose Last 7 Days. Copy that URL and paste it into a cell on your calendar. Do that for every keyword/hashtag you need. Label them, and set those cells’ formatting to clip the contents, not wrap. (It screws up the look of your calendar.)
  7. Schedule your posts no more than one week in advance. Every Monday morning, I schedule the week’s social media posts for all of my clients. This way, I’m not working too far ahead if there are any major disruptions to their news or social media flow.
  8. With each new month, just Duplicate the most recent page. Then, highlight the calendar, hit Delete, and start all over. Change the dates, drop in your hashtags, and start filling up the content again.
  9. Use a service like HootSuite, Buffer, or TweetDeck to schedule your posts. To schedule your social posts, use a service like one of the ones mentioned, or any of the other options out there. Of course, these all cost money, and some are more expensive than others. You can post to TweetDeck for free, but it only lets you post to Twitter. However, there’s a workaround: Set up a few automation tasks on IFTTT.com or Zapier.com. These tools will let you automate certain tasks, such as reposting an Instagram photo to your Twitter account, or texting you every time it’s going to rain in your area. For a couple clients, I use Zapier to repost all tweets with a certain hashtag (#LI) to LinkedIn. This saves me from spending money on HootSuite, Buffer, or other social scheduling tools.

How ever you set up your own social media and editorial calendar, find a method that’s easy for you and doesn’t require you spending many hours developing an entire schedule for the year. Set up daily and weekly themes to guide you for the kinds of messages you want to share, but keep things loose so you can pivot if the need arises.

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Stop Saying ‘In These Troubled Times’: 5 Amateur Mistakes Content Marketers Keep Making

We’ve had years of practice, thousands of articles written on the rights and wrongs, and millions of social media “experts,” but we still have content marketers and copywriters making the same stupid, amateur mistakes they’ve been warned against.

Now everyone seems to think the current pandemic shutdown somehow changes all the rules, and everything they’ve been told not to do is now fair game.

Not at all. In fact, if anything, this crisis means you have to really buckle down and quit making them.

Here are five amateur mistakes that content marketers and copywriters need to quit making right now.

1. Stop saying “In these troubled times”

Good Lord, if I see “in these trying/terrible/troubled times” once more, I’m going to Hulk-smash my laptop!

They’re are all troubled times! This is nothing special. (Okay, maybe it’s a little different.) But we’ve always had trying times. Even during the good times, we’ve had trying times. “In these trying times” could be said about any time.

Twelve years ago, during the Great Recession, I had a freelance copywriter who used “in these trying times” or “in these economically troubled times” in every single article they handed in for the next four years, even when things were on the upswing.

Every. Single. One.

Bottom line, do not refer to “these troubled times” at all ever. It’s one of the most useless and overused writing clichés in the entire world.

2. Stop sending emails about what YOU’RE doing

Sign that says I Would Have Preferred a Blank Wall Rather Than This Great Piece of Shit. This applies to most marketing messages, especially the ones that say In these troubled times.I’ve seen plenty of emails explaining what a particular company’s response to COVID-19 has been. Some, like my favorite coffee shop or pizza place, are explaining what steps they’re taking to protect customers, because they know that we’re affected by the things they do and don’t do.

Other companies, like software companies I haven’t heard from since 2012, are telling me the steps they’re taking to shelter in place, practice social distancing, and blah blah blah.

Seriously, Chad? You’re just a software company. No one cares.

The only reason you should send an email about your COVID-19 response is if your response directly affects your customers.

For example, if you have a web hosting company, I want to know what steps you’re taking to keep my servers up and running. If you have a rental car company, I only want to know if you’re going to be open or if I can cancel my reservations. I don’t care how closely you’re monitoring the government’s guidance. Don’t give me a 500-word piece of bullshit that doesn’t tell me anything until the last paragraph. (Read Josh Bernoff’s cutting analysis of Hert’z corporate email.)

And, clean out your email list. If you haven’t heard from certain people in more than four years, maybe you should just remove them.

3. Don’t say anything unless you have something to say

This piggybacks off point #2, but it’s a much broader message. As content marketers, we’re already used to filling up people’s inboxes and social streams. And people are 1) ignoring it and 2) tired of it.

So maybe we should instead shut up and do something useful. People are frightened, anxious, and just trying to take care of themselves and their loved ones. So no one needs more marketing clutter to get people to pay attention to us.

If you want to get people’s attention, do something useful. Offer them something to make their lives easier. Accounting software companies, teach people how to become entrepreneurs, because a lot of people are losing their jobs. Personal finance coaches, create videos, blog articles, and podcasts about how to lower our costs and trim our budgets. Restaurants can offer cooking classes or “ask me anything” sessions.

Some companies are already doing this. My gym, like a lot of gyms, are offering workout-at-home video sessions. My friend the yoga instructor is doing Monday night yoga sessions on Facebook Live. Blaze Pizza hosted a virtual pizza party with their executive chef, Brad, where people could ask him questions and get real-time answers.

But other companies are still sending me emails about booking trips, buying electronics, or buying men’s clothing.

I realize you have to find a way to stay in business, but try being useful before you start being commercial.

4. Update your old messages

For some of you, it’s business as usual. For most everyone else, they’re not buying anything. And yes, it’s hurting the economy. And yes, businesses are suffering and they need a way to stay in business. I’m not saying you shouldn’t.

What you should be doing right now is revamping your old messages and updating them to reflect the new reality we’re going to be facing for the next several weeks.

Case in point, a friend from Indiana posted that she saw a commercial from one of the local TV stations reminding people to check in with them for the local traffic report. That’s fine, except there is no traffic because Indiana is on a statewide stay-at-home order.

While the ad may be a good reminder for people once the order is lifted, it’s still a wasted opportunity. Check your upcoming messages and see if any of them have now aged out or ring a little tone deaf in light of the shutdown.

If you have scheduled your messages days and weeks in advance (which is a bad idea), hit Pause on your drip campaign until you can be sure that everything is still valid, true, and necessary. Take that opportunity to update your messages to better reflect your new approaches (see #2) and any new offers you might have.

5. Never, EVER refer to the “China virus”

We all know what this virus family is called — coronavirus — and what this particular strain is called — COVID-19. Those are the two most widely accepted terms that everyone knows and uses. The media is using them, the CDC and the World Health Organization are using them. It’s only certain government officials who are calling it the “China virus,” and it’s causing a lot of problems for Asian Americans.

They’re being threatened, verbally harassed, and in some cases, physically assaulted, all because some mouth-breathing halfwit thinks Chinese people are perpetuating the virus on our country. These are the same mouth-breathing halfwits who think you can also catch it by drinking Corona beer.

Which is made in Mexico. Which is not near China.

So if you use the term China virus, you’re just buying into the same racist dogwhistling nonsense as those other mouth-breathing halfwits. So don’t do it.

Good content marketers are always learning, always improving, always trying to do better. But there are times where we get lazy and settle into old habits and easy cliches just to get through the next assignment. But now is not the time to fall prey to that kind of thinking.

Your customers are counting on you in these troubled times.

Photo credit: Urban Artefakte (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Sportswriters, Don’t Give Up Game Recaps for Social Media

I was listening to a recent episode of Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang, and his interview with Langston Newsome, a sportswriter with the Columbia (Missouri) Tribune. Jeff talks to sportswriters and other writers about the art of writing and state of journalism.

In this episode, Jeff and Langston discussed the need for game recaps — also called “gamers” in the sports journalism biz — and whether there was a need for it.

Langston said he thought gamers were worthless because “I’m not reading the 600-word gamer on any site anymore.”

Black and white image of a journalist. This is how I imagine old-timey sportwriters looked, pipe clenched in his teeth, holding an old style phone.
“Stop the presses, Jimmy! I got the scoop of the century!”
The need for gamers is an ongoing discussion in many sports departments, as sportswriters and editors struggle with whether they need to write a recap of the big plays and turning points in each matchup, or whether the networks’ and teams’ Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts are filling the gap and shoving traditional gamers to the side.

As a social media professional, I can tell you that social media is not the panacea everyone thinks it is. As much as we think this is an online digital world, and we can do away with things like newspapers, libraries, paper books, and even sports gamers, we can’t. We still live in an old-school world that relies on old-school methods and old-school channels of communication.

Not everyone watches games live; they still want to read about what happened. Maybe they don’t live in the area where the game is broadcast. Maybe they don’t have cable. Maybe they had two games they wanted to see.

Not everyone pays attention to teams’ social media; they don’t see the updates that are happening in real time. Maybe they’re at work. Maybe they don’t follow the teams’ social accounts. Maybe they don’t have social media themselves.

Not everyone is online in the first place; they don’t have the ability to see those updates when they’re happening. Maybe they can’t afford a smartphone. Maybe they don’t have Internet access. Maybe they’re seniors who don’t want to deal with the Internet. (These are your biggest newspaper readers, and they’re part of the biggest demographic in the country; 97 million people born between 1928 – 1964.)

Sportswriters, don’t give up on gamers. There’s still a need for them, just as much as there’s a need for analysis and features.

Gamers are glimpses into the past, social updates are real-time, have-to-be-present highlights.

Gamers can focus on some of the smaller plays and interesting facts, social updates only focus on the big, big plays, not the little things.

Don’t Abandon the Old-School Just Yet

One of the favorite digital marketing stats that gets bandied about is that roughly 50% of the country never reads a newspaper. But that means that roughly 50% of the country still reads a newspaper, even if it’s once a week, even if it’s online.

According to a Statista.com report, as of May 2017,

  • 54% of people 60 years and older read a print newspaper at least once a week.
  • 44% of people between 30 – 59 read a print newspaper at least once a week.
  • Only 28% of people between 18 – 29 read a print newspaper once a week or more.*

* These are the people to gear digital news toward. They’re the ones looking at game highlights online and following teams’ social media accounts.

While the need for gamers may eventually go away, that day is not today. There are still plenty of people old enough to keep reading newspapers — there are 72.56 million Baby Boomers in the U.S., people born between 1946 – 1964 and another 24.44 million born between 1928 – 1945 — and they’re not embracing digital.

So sportswriters should keep writing gamers for as long as there’s a need and an audience. Don’t go by your own viewing and reading habits to determine what’s acceptable and wanted by 97 million other people in this country.

Besides, gamers help you become a better writer in the long run.

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Writing the Old Fashioned Way (GUEST POST)

Every so often, I will feature guest posts from writers who actually have important and interesting things to say. Irene Roth is a professional writer and writing coach, which means she really knows her stuff. When she offered an article on how to improve your writing with an unusual technique, I happily took her up on it.

The vast majority of writers seem to have a keyboard of some kind close by. Whether it is a tiny keyboard on our phone, tablet, laptop, or a desktop keyboard, we are quite comfortable with typing our thoughts out quickly and efficiently for later on. Typing on screens have become the new norm. Neither do we have to spend many hours retyping our material from longhand later on. We believe we can save time if we simply type our work right onto the computer screen.

So, let’s look at four ways that writing our manuscripts in longhand can actually boost our creative energies just by picking up a pen instead of typing on a screen.

1. We Will Remember What We Wrote

The act of writing longhand will help us remember more of what we’re taking notes on. This is crucially important when we’re doing research for our manuscripts. Typing is a far less neurologically complex process than writing. This is because typing is simply a mechanical movement. We don’t really seem to be engaged with our material as much when we are writing things down. Further, when we write, large parts of our brains light up, making the activity much more complex.

2. It Beats Writer’s Block

Most writers struggle with writer’s block some time in their careers. We all have different ways of dealing with this difficulty. However, one of the best ways to consistently overcome writer’s block is to change the way we write. So, for instance, if we typically write on the computer screen, we should switch to writing longhand. And from my years of coaching, I have discovered that writers believe that writing in longhand is the solution to the problem.

This is probably because writing activates different parts of the brain. Therefore, it can short-circuit a case of writer’s block quite quickly. After all, we are using different muscles in our brain to write longhand. This can potentially trigger a positive array of interconnected thoughts, ideas and memories which can reduce or eliminate writer’s block.

3. We Will Write More Clearly

Irene S. Roth, author of Writing the Old-Fashioned WayBecause writing by hand is slower than typing, it also feels more labor-intensive. Because of this, writing by hand is actually a great tool to learn how to write more concisely and effectively. We will be more aware of extra words that we use or if we used a wrong word. In addition, the amount of focus that it takes to put pen to paper also helps us create more complete sentences with better and more vivid scenes. When we’re typing on the computer, we will be much more distracted than when we write by hand.

We Will Revise Better

Revising is by far the hardest part of writing. Just because we completed a first draft of our manuscript doesn’t mean that we’re done. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. The editing process has only just begun. We are usually way too close to our writing, so it may be hard to be objective about our writing, making editing difficult. Because we’ll need to transcribe our handwritten pages to a typed manuscript, we get the opportunity to review every word we’ve written as we type it. This can also help us detach from our work. By the time we finish typing up our manuscript, we can rework passages of our work so that they are smoother and more precise.

Given all of these benefits, it is important for writers to try to write in longhand as often as possible. Not only will they enjoy the overall creative process, think more clearly, and write better quality manuscripts, they will enjoy writing and will look forward to coming back to their writing the next day. Who knows, we may just fall in love with it too.

Irene S. Roth has a Master’s Degree in Philosophy and Psychology from York University and is currently using her expertise to write for kids about empowerment and self-esteem. She has published ten nonfiction books for kids and teens and sixty-five books for adults as well as 2,000 articles and book reviews both online and in print. She has been running workshops at Savvy Authors on many different topics for writers. She also leads a very successful mentoring program for writers on Savvy Authors that is in its fourth year.