Better #55

Hello friend,

I’m sending this out on my birthday.

I’m 44 as of today (yip, Taurus), which feels pretty old some days, and maybe makes me too old to be talking about social media.

But so it goes…

I was actually supposed to send this out last week, but somehow the amount of time it takes me to put these newsletters together always surprises me.

I tend to agonise over them and review and refine beyond the point of usefulness. I don’t use AI as I’m sure some people would probably advise. But it’s important to me that I do this myself.

When I get a message saying that a reader has used an idea or a stat or a piece of advice from one of these newsletters to help or unblock or fix something in their work, that feels pretty bloody cool.

So thanks for reading, and for your support in general.

I have no idea how long I’ll keep this up for (or how long people will keep hiring me to help them), but hopefully I’ve got another birthday in me at least.

Talk soon.

Cheers 👋
Seamus Boyer

We are way too safe, rushed, and/or lazy with our hooks.

(Sorry, just jumped right into it there)

In fact, some of us probably need a bit of a hook to the chops to snap us out of our use of the cliched intros we insert into post captions, email subject lines, video intros, and other things we send into the world.

We all do it, often because we’re tired and harried and uninspired and just getting s...t out the door. I do it, too. Too often.

But the attention economy sucks in how unforgiving it is. There is only a finite amount of attention we are competing for online at any one time, and we are up against the world’s best creators playing in the purely entertainment space, those whose entire job is making other humans stop scrolling. That’s it.

Which means we need to spend more time on our hooks and not just introducing our posts in obvious, expected ways.

Job to do? Jolt people awake

A good hook creates an interruption. It introduces tension, surprise, curiosity, specificity, novelty, emotion, or contrast.

It jolts people out of their scrolly autopilot mode by doing something.

Importantly, this does not mean turning everything into clickbait (with clickbait, when people stop scrolling, they feel tricked - our content doesn’t do that).

And, of course, in emergencies, the key message will often be enough, so we don’t need to play around with it.

But outside emergencies and disasters, most organisations need to create interest instead of assuming it already exists. Because it probably doesn’t.

We only have 2 real levers…

When you think about it, we have f-all attention-grabbing tools to play with.

On social we have the image, first second of the video, and we have the first line of the caption. That’s it for hooks (or is it? read on to find out…).

With email we have the subject line and the preview text. For articles we might have the headline, intro, thumbnail, and preview text.

These very limited things are what stands between us and failure or success. Triumph or shame. A chorus of cheers or a deafening cacophony of boos (or is it boo-urns?).

A taster of cliches from LinkedIn…

Recently, I got an AI tool to scrape and analyse about 5,000 opening sentences from government and council LinkedIn posts (a good use of AI, I reckon).

The results were magnificently depressing. Here are the top 10 most used:

1. we’re looking for

2. we’re excited to

3. we’re proud to

4. over the past

5. did you know

6. we are looking

7. have your say

8. are you a

9. last week, we

10. join us for

While the job-themed hooks will have resonance for those wanting that job, all of them are just so cliched and overused.

And the ‘last week’ one is so bad “I can’t even” (as my daughter would say).

These kind of stock intros don’t just show up on social, either. I reckon I’ve been waiting about 20 years for my university alumni emails to change their subject line from “Alumni Update” to something more interesting.

I haven’t opened one in a decade.

The hook is the only bit you actually need

In reality, while we often include key messages and CTAs and stuff in our comms, the hook is actually the only bit we really need on each post.

As I’ve written and taught often, the basic anatomy of a public sector post is:

• Hook

• (Message)

• (Evidence)

• (CTA)

All but the hook are in brackets, because they aren’t always needed (and can actually get in the way of a post performing). Messages and CTAs are important, but not every single time.

Meanwhile, some of the best-performing public sector content is radically simple.

Take Queensland Health’s famous Facebook status updates (above), which are just very short lines of text, but doing a huge amount of heavy lifting.

“am i pregante?” for example. Those three words are the hook, but also the whole post.

Or how about “XOXO, go sip girl”.

They then back it up with the message, evidence, and CTA in the first comment. But they also back it up with further hooks in the comments too (cos why the hell not).

As Vincci Ng, author of the ‘go sip’ post reported on LinkedIn - that one status update generated more than 32k likes and 3 million organic impressions.

“Living proof that your content doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles - it just needs a good hook,” Vincci wrote.

Too bloody right.

The best in the biz

I say it all the time and I’ll say it again: for me, the best public sector social hooks on the planet come from the U.S. National Park Service.

I was lucky enough to talk to their social media specialist, Matthew Turner, for an earlier edition of this newsletter (Better #37), and he talked about providing entertainment as well as education to their audience.

“Adding subtle puns (we don’t go too crazy), a nod to pop culture, repackaging a meme or trend to fit our audience and brand, or just infusing some personality allows people to connect on a more personal level, again, not usually the norm for a government agency.”

They don’t roast people or act all unhinged. “Instead, we prefer more of a wink and a nod, a bit of sass, but overall, a vibe that we’re all in this together and having a good time.”

A good example is above where, when you see it on Twitter, it makes the separation between hook and message clear as day. The first Tweet (intro and pic) are the hook, then the message follows in the thread.

So many orgs start with the second bit, whatever their equivalent of the “Did you know owls have large eyes?” part is.

But without the “We hope this email finds you well” part, the overall value drops a million-fold.

You have no right to do me like that, bear

The above bear post actually stopped me in my tracks with its hook. Like, I literally stopped and had to take stock of my life and career and thoughts on the state of the universe.

Yes, the bear is gorgeous, but once you read the intro you know that actually, the image was never enough on its own. It might have seemed like it was, but it wasn’t. Not by a long way.

Read the hook aloud slowly and savour it with me : “One day you’re young and wild; the next, it’s Monday, and you’re dialing into a teams call.”

I mean, it has rhythm, FFS. It could be Philip Larkin or Raymond Carver.

The post had no right to affect me the way it did. But it did (and does again today), because the hook is generous and thoughtful and perfect.

The magical third hook

If you consistently deliver value, with thoughtful, creative hooks and content, you eventually can establish an unfair advantage.

What I think of as the ‘third hook’ on social, which is a rare and magical thing. (It works good if you do the hands when you say it, like Spongebob’s rainbow)

At first, people stop because of the image or the first line. But eventually, they stop because they recognise your organisation’s name or logo at the top of the post.

They pause and sit up because experience has taught them your content will probably be worth their attention. They stop because of you.

That’s the third hook, and it’s incredibly powerful, as trust starts doing some real attention leg-work for you.

There are a couple of newsletters, too, that I’ll open regardless of the subject line, because the sender has built enough trust, curiosity, and consistency over time. Same deal with certain of my LinkedIn connections and journalist bylines.

Start small and build

As I mentioned at the start, we need to jolt people a little. Spark them into paying some attention to us - rather than to all those other jerks out there we’re competing with.

So how do you actually do that?

Well, appropriate humour is an obvious one and can be a good place to start. Try a pun or a dad joke to ease your way in, like gentling a toe into a hot bath or a cold lake. (gentle is a verb, right?)

Or get together with your funnest and funniest colleagues and riff for 20 minutes. Michael Corcoran of Ryanair social media fame once told me he created writers-room-style sessions for his team called “The Cutting Room Floor”.

“The Cutting Room Floor was this safe space for my team. I’d say, ‘Forget about the rules, here's some basic guiding principles about what I want you to do and how I want the content to sound and look like, and whatever comes in here is only seen by us, and nobody judges us. It's a place for you to create it and get it out of your mind and start making content’.”

“Safe space” is the important bit, so keep that front of mind.

In the end, anything that feels playful, joyful, human, or slightly surprising is probably heading in the right direction. As long as it is a deliberate attempt to hook people’s attention with the very few tools we have, it’ll be fine.

So find your version of it.

And when you come up with something interesting, try pushing it one notch further.

Remember: you don’t need to go from a 2 to an 8 on the bold-ometer overnight. That’ll scare the horses.

But maybe from a 2 to a 3.

Or a 3 to a 5. That’s plenty.

Deal?

Get to it.

Ok, that’s it for today.

Does anyone actually read this part?

If yes, have a nice day. Maybe treat yourself to a cheese scone, or a piece of caramel slice.

And I’ll see you again on [waves hand in vague motion] for more tips on how to get just a little bit Better 👋