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Once a month HTWB picks out the best/most useful articles on content writing and allied topics, from around the web. Here’s the choice for October 2015:
- Where next with live video
- Educating readers
- Future of digital marketing
- Email: yet another comeback?
- Are questions in headlines powerful?
- Facebook wants your blog posts
- …and Shelley tells us how to take advantage of that
- Twitter finally stops strangling us
- Giggling headshot: whatever next?
- …and 2 crazy Canadians joke about business writing
- Read on!
Content writing for live video: instant words for broadcasting?
There is still a crazy explosion going on of live video toy-toys like Blab, Periscope, Meerkat as well as renewed interest in Google Hangouts. And there are more of these crawling out of the woodwork every week. It will be interesting to see which succeed and which don’t.
In the UK at least, at more and more live networking meetings you’ll notice someone holding up a smartphone and eventually they say, “oh, we’re on Periscope…and there are XX other people tuning into our conversation.” That’s all fine and dandy, but how do you arm yourself for this in the words that you choose to use for broadcasting across the airwaves? I wrote about that here. What do you think?
The top curated content writing articles
How To Improve Your Educational Content Marketing Like A Successful Teacher
By Julie Neidlinger on CoSchedule.com. Yet again, Julie comes up with some genuinely helpful tips, and I quote: “your educational content marketing, after all, is strongly about teaching people. Knowing a bit about educational theories will improve your content marketing. Let’s take a look at the different ways people learn, and how you can tap into that.” Given that educational content = quality content for your audience, this is an excellent parallel and very useful knowledge for us all.
Digital Marketing Trends That Have Emerged Over 2015
By Anoop Gupta on Digital Marketing Trends. “Whilst 2015 is far from over, the last nine months have seen a number of digital marketing trends emerge and others from years past prevail. With the end of the year only a few months away, we felt that now was the best time to take a look at some of these trends, as it’s the last chance for many businesses to begin implementing them before it’s too late.” A worrying warning, or just a useful update? Can’t make up my mind, but well worth reading anyway.
The Resurgence of Email Marketing
By Anna Muehlenhaupt on Business 2 Community. It’s interesting to see how dear old Email Marketing keeps bobbing up on the surface of an increasingly turbulent ocean of digital stuff. Much as many may see it as archaic, you can’t beat email for its ability to penetrate through all the frivolous and voluminous cr*p of the internet and get straight to the point with the people you need to connect with … provided, of course, that you use it carefully. This article shares some useful updates.
The Question of Asking Questions
By Joanna Wiebe on Copyhackers. This discusses the use of questions in headlines. Used correctly they are very powerful, but get them wrong and you lose attention right away. Thankfully Wiebe shows us how to do it right with some workable examples, and even goes into the psychology of “button copy” … what you say on a clickable blob, and what you say adjacent to it, can have a strong influence on how many clicks you get.
Facebook Rolls Out New Notes Interface To Get Users To Blog
By Jef Cozza on Top Tech News. It has been possible to post full length blogs/articles on Facebook for some time now, but they don’t exactly reach out and slap you in the face with their obviousness. Now Facebook – possibly having noticed the stampede of bloggers posting on LinkedIn Pulse and other platforms – have prettied up the surroundings to bring FB bloggers out of the closet and into the daylight. Mr Cozza explains, in rather more polite terms…
A Facebook Update To Tell You About
By my good friend and Social Media whizzy colleague Shelley Röstlund of My Social Intelligence. What I love most about my pal Shelley is that she cuts through any amount of BS and tells you in words of few syllables what you need to do to make the damned thing work for you. Here, she explains how to make the best use of the new Facebook blogging toy-toy and I quote … “It’s like blogging (telling longer stories) – but embedded within your personal Facebook account. You can choose who can see each individual post.” She concludes … “Give me a shout if you have any questions about Notes, how to activate it and whether you want to know WHY to use it.” Good call. Drop her a note.
Report: Twitter Plans To Allow Tweets Longer Than 140 Characters
By Martin Beck on Marketing Land. Well, yeeee hah! At long last … “Twitter is building a product that would allow long-form tweets, multiple sources have told Recode. … Such a move would be a major departure from Twitter’s founding days, when its 140-character limit was a necessary nod to the 160-character maximum in SMS messages.” Mind you, I wonder if this will spoil the crispness we’ve come to use when twittering, and make Twitter just slink down into the sludge as yet another ordinary online platform. What do you think?
Video, Video Everywhere – even now on Facebook profiles (sort of…)
By Aigerim Shorman and Tony Hsieh, Product Managers, on the Facebook Newsroom. Don’t get excited … it’s only the option to have a few seconds of you grinning, gurning or grumping in a GIF like micro-vid on your profile page, but it’s a start. “Soon, you’ll be able to film a short, looping video clip that will play for anyone who visits your profile…We believe these improvements to profile will give people more ways to connect and share with each other, and express themselves in meaningful ways.” Er, watch this space.
Funny business writing
It’s OK to be humorous in business writing when it’s something viewers and customers can laugh with … but when they laugh at something you’ve written, you’re in trouble. This video, with Alberta-based Canadians (of course…) Michael Kerr and the amazing Textman himself, Mike Vlessides, makes that point amusingly…
What latest news about content writing can you share with us?
Please let us know in the comments!
Still images thanks to Grammarly.com