Writing for Twitter and Writing for Action [Julian Shapiro, Aella, Sam Parr]

Audio source: https://www.brainspodcast.com/episode/internet-creators-2

• Julian
  • Research top ranked posts of all time (HN Algolia, Twitter like filters, Indiehackers top posts) and find the patterns
  • Threads are useful because they show "meat" - "proves that you can sustain how interesting you are across multiple messages"
  • Julian's post on Content Marketing: Novelty and Usefulness
  • Categories of novelty:
    • Counterintuitive — "I had no idea" or "I would have never thought that's how the world worked".
    • Elegant sentence — "It's where you capture something, people know, but you say it so beautifully. They think I couldn't have said that better. Or you took the words right out of my head."
    • Shock and awe — "holy crap. I cannot believe that just happened. Thanks for sharing that news." 
  • Actionable: 
    • "Hey, now that you know this novel piece of information, here's what you can do". 
    • "Here are the steps, here's how this would now affect how you navigate the world going forward." 
  • "Actionable and novel in like a thread form tends to perform exceptionally well."
• Aella
  • "Aella has all these polls on Twitter and they're almost always asking people like these super controversial things."
  • "What I did is I went through all of the polls. I've been doing polls for like pretty steadily for about three years. I have around 1500 and I put them all on a spreadsheet. And then I sorted them all by like the amounts of likes and retweets. And like, I weighted them differently. And then I sorted it by ones that are most divisive. So like the answers tend to be like roughly 50, 50. And then I selected from there in different categories. And I had people like vote on them. So Twitter is a proving grounds."
  • https://www.askhole.io/
• Sam
  • "I know how to use the written word to get people to do what I want them to do."
  • Copywork
    • "the best way to get good is I found people who I admired and who were best in their field. And then I would write their workout by hand." 
    • "So for example, there was a handful of long-form copywriters that are considered the best. And I spent six months writing it out by hand copying each of their ads." 
    • "Then I wanted to learn a little bit about writing, uh, like books. So I took JD Salinger's book and I wrote that up by hand."
    • "if you want to learn how to become a good script writer for like comedy, for movies, you to go and find a Judd Apatow script or Woody Allen script and write it up by hand"
    • "I see the commonalities between all these cause I've been copying them. Now I know how to put my texture on this because I've learned the combination of what the people I like do. And I'm gonna make a little bit of my own, add my own flair to that."
    • "You actually have to feel the rhythm like a great writer. You can have one short sentence and then a really long sentence and you can feel these rhythms by writing it up by hand. And it's because when you write it out by hand, it forces you to acknowledge every single syllable, every single comma, every single period."
  • Three step process: Copy, Internalize, and Make It Your Own.

Transcript

swyx: Usually the topics are a little bit unpredictable on the show. So I'm going to try something a little different this week. This week, we're going to focus on writing how to write better, how to write more engaging, uh, and get more readers. So the first feature today is Julian Shapiro. Julian, very interesting system as a creator from writing Twitter threads that convert into his blog posts and from his blog posts converting into email subscribers.

[00:00:28] Julian Shapiro: So this gets us to the topic of how do you optimize for growing as quickly as possible on these channels? The way I start is I think, how do I get my hands on all of the top ranked posts of all time? And then if I can see what those are, can I then find the patterns?

[00:00:43] So they're really, the only trick here is find a tool that lets you measure or lets you identify. All of those top ranked posts. So for hacker news, you can use, Algolia like the search feature. And then for Twitter, you can actually use tweet, deck tweet, deck dot, twitter.com. And you can rank things essentially, but you can filter the middle east by how many likes do they have?

[00:01:03] So if I filter by 10,000 likes or more, I start looking for the patterns among these high-performing pieces. Content. 

[00:01:09] Courtland Allen: Do you, nobody does this because like on hack, like on any hackers on like, I literally on the homepage, I'm like, here are the best posts of all time. Here are the best posts every month.

[00:01:17] You're the best post every week. And I'm hoping people will go back and look at the best posts and make more posts like that because I want them to, and they never do. They just make kind of crappy posts and they complain like, why is nobody liking my posts? I'm like, the answers are literally right in front of you.

[00:01:31] Like, it could not make it easy, easier to find what works. Right. Right. Okay. So we were talking about Twitter earlier. What are you seeing that works well? 

[00:01:39] Julian Shapiro: So you want to tweet threads for the most part, if you're trying to get retweets and retweets are what bring followers. And so the reason threads are useful is because it shows so much meat.

[00:01:50] It's like, here's all this content. It's not just a single tweet. It's a bunch of glued together, which proves that you can sustain how interesting you are across multiple messages. So you're a de-risked person to follow. You can keep giving people the goods and when you're tweeting threads or tweeting single tweets, usually you want to think.

[00:02:09] A two-part framework that I write about on my website, which is novelty and actionable. So novelty means you're sharing something new that wouldn't have been easy to figure out on your own and it makes you think, wow. So there's a few categories of novelty. One is counterintuitive like, oh, I had no idea or I would have never thought that's how the world worked.

[00:02:29] Another category of novelty would be elegant sentence. It's where you capture something, people know, but you say it so beautifully. They think I couldn't have said that better. Or you took the words right out of my head. Right. And the last category is shock and awe it's like, holy crap. I cannot believe that just happened.

[00:02:47] Thanks for sharing that news. And then actionable is this thing you tack on at the end, where it's like, Hey, now that you know this novel piece of information, here's what you can do, right. Here, like the steps, here's how this would now affect how you navigate the world going forward. So actionable and novel in like a thread form tends to perform exceptionally well.

[00:03:08] Courtland Allen: have you seen Aella's account? Like as far as I can tell, you're just asking like the most controversial, provocative questions and polls you possibly can that no one else would do because we're all afraid of getting canceled. 

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