Like a Whisper

Public broadcasting is a balance. It’s a balance between not getting your message across to an audience at all and spamming your message so loudly that its demand for attention becomes deafening and is ignored altogether.

I feel I haven't been broadcasting Chasing Perfection articles optimally. I’m making some changes to how I broadcast articles today, and I think you’ll like them. When I share my writing, I don’t want to yell out like an entitled child; I want to unveil my very own work of art.

The more you shout, the fewer listen.

A new entry is added to Chasing Perfection about once a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Due to this infrequent-esque posting schedule (and the relative timelessness of articles), I often feel I should share new entries to twitter more than once — after all, twitter is where most of my audience resides (and not everyone reads every tweet in their timeline). Mentioning an article more than once would increase the chances of each follower seeing and enjoying the articles.

Unfortunately, the caveat here is that some people do read every tweet. For those people, seeing the same article mentioned by the same individual multiple times would surely become tiresome very quickly. I don’t want to annoy or spam my followers, so this seems far from ideal.

There is a Chasing Perfection twitter account which tweets a link to every new entry, and there’s my personal twitter account, which tweets on no particular schedule.

My new strategy for sharing articles is to make further use of retweets: my personal twitter account will share tweets from the CP account. I will not abide by a strict policy; not all will be shared, but most certainly will. My judgement will come into play here. The main reason for this is that the retweets will only be seen by those who do not already follow the CP account. For someone who does follow the CP account and my personal account, there will be no repeated tweets.

The second prong of this new approach is creating a tweet-sized description of each article. That description, along with a link to the article in question, will be tweeted from my personal account. These “tease-tweets” will act as a blurb; individually crafted to provide new value even to those who have read the article already.

The problem with retweets is that they’re endorsements of something else, rather than statements by the retweeter. A viewer of a retweet sees the username and avatar of the retweetee, with only a small mention of the retweeter. Interestingly, this is similar to how twitter displays adverts.

I feel it is important to tweet both from my own account — a “tease-tweet”, if you will — and to retweet the CP account. The personal tweet and the retweet contain different content. The personal tweet has my avatar next to it and doesn’t look at all like an advert. This makes the link appear more trustworthy and of higher quality. The CP retweet will appear to be more “adverty”, but is also a statement from me: “If you like my writing, why not follow the CP twitter account?”

Getting a broadcasting balance just right is hard. These changes should hopefully improve my own balance without annoying followers, repeatedly saying the same thing, or shouting.

I’ll whisper more and shout less.