TWITTER is just a series of little information nuggets, and the best ones are filled with as much gold as possible.
I have found that a great way to pack posts full of good content is to use images creatively and write lists onto pictures using photoshop. This essentially gives me an unlimited word count and allows our team to share large groups of factoids in a single tweet.
You see this technique used across all sorts of different subjects on twitter, with varying degrees of quality and success. They can range from cropped screen-shots of websites to professionally crafted graphic designs.
Of course, the opportunity to have a much larger word count than Twitter would usually allow shouldn't be abused. Part of the reason for its success is that the 140 character format encourages users to be concise and clever about what they post. So with that in mind, I'm always keen to make the text in the pictures just as snappy as it would be in a tweet.
In many ways, twitter encourages everyone to write like a journalist and cut out all the unnecessary words. These rules still apply.
An obvious area where stats and facts can be really effective is football reporting. Football fans famously love a good stat, and huge numbers of them (including myself) are active on Twitter.
The example above is one I created after David Moyes was sacked as Man United manager. It was a huge story, so very obviously a good story to follow up on.
I made sure the background was Man United red by taking a screenshot of their website and pasting into photoshop, then using the eyedropper tool to get the correct shade. I then cut out a picture of Moyes to paste in and added a drop shadow onto the cutout image.
After that, it was just a case of assembling the facts from various online sources, checking them, and writing them in around the image. I also made sure to link back to Sun goals digital service, as we are constantly looking to cross-promote social media and paid-for Sun content.
As you can see, the post was retweeted hundreds of times. It also went on to become our most successful ever post on Google+.
#SUCCESS
The Cheltenham Festival horse racing event is a big driver of newspaper sales, so in March our team was asked to generate as much interest in it as possible.
The Sun was running full racing coverage throughout the event both online and in print, which meant there was plenty of content to push out through all of our channels. However, as many non-horse racing fans will know, horse racing can be pretty boring if you don't like, er, horse racing.
So to keep the rest of our followers interested, we decided to try to create some content that would raise a smile from those who aren't especially keen on racing, while still keeping the conversation focused on the festival.
The post we came up with is below.
If you've read my previous blog post about Simon Cowell, you might now be starting to think that all we ever do at Social HQ is photoshop people's faces onto the heads of other people (or animals). I promise you that is not the case, regardless of how plainly hilarious I believe this technique to be. However, on this occasion I must admit to being convinced that this bladder-burstingly funny gag was destined to be our most successful ever.
Sadly, this wasn't to be the case. A large number of people who responded accused us of racism.
When we conceived the idea, neither myself nor the social editor had even the tiniest inkling it might be construed as racist. To me, the concept was simple: Usain Bolt is the fastest man on the planet and a famously cheeky, larger-than-life character. If we put his face on a horse, and imply that he has inexplicably turned up at the Cheltenham Festival, it will be funny because:
- The picture is clearly hilarious (or is it just me??!)
- The picture will take the reader by surprise after the ostensibly serious text about cheating at the festival
Some readers did like it - it got 36 retweets - but many responded with messages accusing us of slavery-related racism. Their reasoning was that horses are essentially enslaved by their owners and are often associated with being forced into work.
We should perhaps have anticipated such a reaction, but I still to this day can't fully accept their point. Why would we try to use the Cheltenham Festival as a way of making complicated metaphors about slavery? Isn't the much more simple explanation (Fast man + fast animal + unexpected situation = funny) also the more obvious one? I even suspect the outrage might just have sprung out of an unconscious reaction to the striking similarity between the horse's coat and Mr Bolt's complexion. I suppose I'll never know.
So to sum up: I'm sad to say there really isn't any way that I'm able convince myself this post was a success (despite the positive responses we did receive), so I'm duty bound to record here this blog's very first #FAIL.
