Is your attention-seeking content creation behavior being rewarded or shunned?
If you’re in the business of marketing with content, you know your content has important work to do, far beyond the “writer’s high” described by Shane Snow in this Contently article.
“You want your content to help you build relationships with high-value audiences and move the needle for your business. But to build an audience, the key is the same as when you’re trying to activate that reward center—you need to get people to talk,” Snow writes. “This has been true since before the Internet and will be true after the world gets nuked and the only things left are cockroaches and Gawker Media.”
Snow breaks it down for us into an easy-to-remember mnemonic that reads F-I-N.
F Is For Fluency
As Snow notes, “Great writing speeds you along.” If you focus on making your writing fluent, instead of writing to impress with fancy jargon and million-dollar words, your content will be more digestible.
“Speedy writing—or high fluency—allows people to process your message faster, which makes it more likely that they’ll share it, said Drake Baer of Business Insider in an interview with Snow.
I Is For Identity
“People connect with stories that they can personally relate to in some way. More importantly, Baer says, people click on headlines that promise something relatable,” according to Snow. The secret is to allow the reader to inject a bit of themselves into the story, so they can immediately relate.
N Is For Novelty
“At the end of the day, novelty is what causes us to pay attention to and/or spread messages. Our brains are built to notice and remember things that are new, and great writers harness that biological impulse to craft stories that people can’t help but talk about,” says Snow.
If you can give your audience something they’ve never seen, or trigger their nervous system to think something is important, you’ll grab them and make them want to share.
The entire article is well worth a read, and will help you cook that awesome sauce for your own content creations.