As a writing teacher, it was always fun to assign speculative projects — write an OSHA safety report for Mickey Mouse’s funhouse, write a technical paper describing the advantages of a sub-style sandwich over a sliced-bread sandwich, create a henchmen recruiting website for a supervillain.
Spec Ad Creation Process
Unfortunately, I’m not great at coming up with totally random things, so I’ve enlisted the help of ChatGPT and some spreadsheet software. You can find my spreadsheet here. The lists of industries, audiences, products, and timings are all generated by ChatGPT (again, not great at random generation here), and the spreadsheet just pulls a random item from each list either (a) when you load the page or (b) when you re-calculate the sheet.
The sheet generates three prompts for ChatGPT, requesting a creative brief with those details. A creative brief includes all of the detail necessary for a project. Because this is all being mad-libbed together, I’m asking the Google Sheet to create 3 prompts, and then I’ll pick one from that set each day I’m able to set aside time for a spec.
The Products You’re here to see what I can make, not my walkthrough! Here is a brief client description from ChatGPT followed by the products. Day 1: Social Post I needed to figure out what the core message was for this chair, so I started with a social post. I settled on the idea of…
As a writing teacher, it was always fun to assign speculative projects — write an OSHA safety report for Mickey Mouse’s funhouse, write a technical paper describing the advantages of a sub-style sandwich over a sliced-bread sandwich, create a henchmen recruiting website for a supervillain. Spec Ad Creation Process Unfortunately, I’m not great at coming…
I write a fair amount of social media posts as part of my job, and I won’t lie: I always get excited when I see them come up in one of my feeds.
I used to teach and assess writing, though, so I always wonder what makes my work perform well or poorly—and, in the case of social media, I wonder what “performing well” really means. Honestly, that issue alone makes social media writing one of the most challenging parts of my job. Good reason to dive in and see what’s happening rhetorically!
Anatomy of a Post
It’s 2023, and I think we’re all pretty aware of what a social media post looks like. In the interest of good writing and explaining what I have control over as a content writer, though, let’s run through the parts really quick.
The posting profile is at the top of the post, including a name and profile picture. LinkedIn provides a follower count. I have no control over these things.
The post content. This is what I write.
A “call to action” or CTA. This tells the reader what to do in response to the info they’re looking at.
Hashtags! LinkedIn posts prefer hashtags at the bottom, Twitter embeds them in the post, Facebook does… something?
The post image. I can provide some input as a writer, but this isn’t something I control. (In fact, for many posts, I’m told what the image will be to ensure the text and graphic work together.)
The post link text. I don’t control this, but our social media team can change it using a common <meta> element in the linked page’s <head>. I can make suggestions, and the social team and I usually work together to make sure the link text works well with the post text.
I cut off the number of reactions in the big picture, but you can see in the version at the top that there were 8 likes at the time I grabbed this.
Like and Subscribe: A Measure of Success?
So, maybe to start this out… is a post that gets 8 likes in 17 hours successful?
This post is part of a series. We are really looking for folks to fill specific manufacturing positions, and maybe LinkedIn is not the right example to grab for this.
34 likes in 2 days on a different platform, which is better, but not quite viral.
I’m leaving all of the examples in here because these are part of a cluster of posts, each highlighting something different about the workplace, each intended to attract a specific type of applicant. This one was posted to the company’s community page on Facebook (different from its technical page, which has a large audience of engineers).
Part of the goal here was not to reach just the initial audience but passed them. Folks like the commenter and other community members provide an extra level of reach through their likes, interactions, and shared visibility with their own contacts. Ideally, by reaching members of the community who are already favorably disposed towards the company, we’d also have some reach into folks who may be positively predisposed but not actively connected on social media.
With that in mind, a few likes and comments are a success. We continue to get applicants at a sustainable rate, and the posts in this cluster are continuing to go out as planned.
Rhetorical Breakdown
This post, like most social media posts, works because of a few simple rhetorical mechanics.
It has the right ethos, both in the sense that the original post comes from the company that’s hiring and that any shares or extended visibility come from people who are known to the end-contact. This isn’t a random LinkedIn recommendation about a company that’s hiring. This is especially important at a time when workers are conscious of their value and won’t accept just any employer.
It builds on some pathos or existing dispositions and values in the audience. Both of these posts (all of them in the cluster, too) emphasize growth on the job: training, mentorships, and apprenticeships. Some posts talk about other benefits, including retirement benefits that exist for everyone. These posts emphasize that employment is a means to more than a paycheck, and that employment isn’t a revolving door of lowest-bidders for work.
There’s a sense of cause-and-effect in the logos of the posts, as well, beyond simply work –> paycheck. There’s an additional effect of work –> advancement, supporting both of the earlier points that this is an environment for long-term growth.
Was that intentional? You bet.
It’s been over a year since I was on the job market. I remember getting ghosted, which is why it was a relief to get to write that qualified interviewees get offers the same day. I also remember thinking long and hard about whether I’d have the same opportunity for skill growth that I had as a teacher (in that I was always teaching some new technology or tool that I had to learn first), so I enjoyed getting to write that growth was basically guaranteed for everyone.
Lessons Learned?
There is always something new to learn in every project. This wasn’t my first social post or even my first “we’re hiring” social post. But, in composing four of these back-to-back, I remembered a lesson in writing short-form documents like this: find your key takeaway, and don’t let anything distract from that.
There are a lot of moving parts in each of these posts. A core message, like “we support your growth.” Company messaging, like the “we make electric power safer, more reliable, and more economical” mission statement. Supporting factoids, like mentorships and training to support growth. Logistical detail, like same-day job offers.
All of these parts have to come together without sounding like a pile of parts. They need to tell a story in a few dozen words, and the moral of that story has to be the core message in the graphic: we support your growth.
In the classroom, there are lots of neat tricks we can do to meet the messaging goal under the most visible constraint: post length. We grab a thesaurus and swap 20 characters for 10, not thinking about the rarity of specific words. (When you’re a writing/communication/English/media major, you appreciate those words when you see them.) We combine clauses and gloss over “obvious” parts of a message. In many ways, we forget the audience when we’re in a classroom because we never see the likes and reactions on the other end.
We miss authentic responses and engagement, which is really the thing that these posts are meant to provoke.
