Be better at engaging people

General Discussion
#1

Short version:

Sharing something? Answer these questions in your post:

What are you posting?
Where does it come from and who is writing/ speaking?
Who are they?
Why is it important?
If it’s more than 5 minutes long, where is a good bit?

Longer version:

One of the things that we as a community have been slowly inching towards over time is using our own community’s resources to advance our cause.
It’s something we need to do. Sitting back and waiting for a friendly billionaire to save us hasn’t done much for us over the past 20 years.

I wanted to make a little guide as to how I think you should approach social media and even this forum when you’re trying to share something you think is important and relevant to our situation.

The number one thing is to respect other people’s time and effort. Don’t expect someone who doesn’t even know you to go out of their way to find out why they should spend time looking at the article, video etc. You want them to either watch, read or like and share? You have to make it easy for them to do what you want them to do.

Tell people what they’re going to get when they click your link. The subject, who is talking, why you should listen to them and what the key point is. Convince your audience that this is a thing they want to do by saying how important it is.

Know what you’re sharing. If you can’t be bothered to watch or read something then ask other people to watch/read, it’s really disrespectful to them. It also might mean you share something boring, irrelevant, or just wrong.

If you’re sharing something on the forum, think about this:

I find a video that might be relevant to us.
It’s 20 minutes long.
I can’t be bothered to watch it.
I post it here and say “check out this video, I think it might be important.”

5 or 6 people watch it. If it turns out the video isn’t important, I saved myself 20 minutes by not watching it but cost us as a forum a couple of hours of our collective time.
This is not a good use of our resources.

So, again, here is what I think we should do:
Make sure you know what you’re posting. If you don’t, why post it?

Describe what is being shared. What is the content about? Say who is writing or speaking and who they are. Why should people listen to them?

Ask yourself why would anyone care enough to click on this link?
If you don’t have an answer that means that people will definitely, 100%, have to click on the link (without misleading them) then try harder.

Next, be respectful of people’s time, say where a good part is, or where things start to get good. If the main part is ten minutes in or in the 4th paragraph, point that out.

There is going to be a lot more to a successful social media strategy and to using our forum resources better, but as a start, when posting content here, I think you should be able to answer the questions I put at the beginning of this post:

What are you posting?
Where does it come from and who is writing/ speaking?
Who are they?
Why is it important?
Where is a good bit?

4 Likes
#2

The irony will not escape me if nobody replies to this topic.

#3

Sorry to kill the irony.

But in all seriousness, as someone who’s been at this for a long time, I think you yourself are wasting time. Telling people what they should do isn’t a good way to get any action going. In any group consisting of disparate, somewhat diverse people, there’s not going to be any cohesion. The nihilism, lethargy, apathy this condition brings only attenuates that.

If you really want people to take action, start the action yourself. Instead of “do this,” it should be, “here’s what I’m doing, it’s having a great impact. Help is always appreciated.”

It’s like what Chris Rock said, he noticed if you’re stranded on the side of the road asking for help, no one helps. But if you get out of your car and start pushing it yourself, people come along and start helping.

Bottom line is people will emulate and replicate others’ behavior. People don’t take directions from strangers.

#4

People are already posting things here and often they’re doing it in a way which means nobody knows why they’re doing it or aren’t incentivised to actually pay attention. In the future, if I think someone’s doing that then I can link to this topic which I think could help them get closer to the result they were hoping for when they made the original post.

I take your point about do, not tell, but ultimately I very rarely post links here but it’s really obvious that people aren’t getting the results they could by just changing their posting style when posting links so I figure that I’d share my thoughts.