Oh, No! I Made A Big Marketing Oopsie...
The result of preaching about something then neglecting it
Longform writing is much easier than shortform writing.
That might be a hot take, except to anyone who’s tried digital writing more than a few times, you probably know what I mean. I’ve been writing medium/long-form for a few years, but it’s only more recently I took an honest shot at writing shortform.
It’s been…a mixed experience. But the biggest surprise has probably been how tricky it is to actually compress ideas into easy-to-read, bite-sized chunks.
And if that’s counter-intuitive…well, I invite you to give it a go.
Anyway, I recently figured I’d try bringing some of my long-form writing to Twitter/X, too. So I took an essay I wrote (for this very newsletter, in fact) that I was quite proud of. I tweaked it into an article for Twitter/X and published it.
After a few hours? Hardly any impressions.
And there was me, thinking the X algorithm was pushing articles to keep people on the platform longer. Did it hate me or something? I had a heart-to-heart with Grok, where it suggested a paid promotion. Not as a way of emptying my pockets, but even investing a tiny amount of money in promotion as a test.
I was apprehensive. Of course Grok would tell me to spend money, but I figured…what harm could it do? If the writing is good, then presumably all I need is more eyes on it…
So, after some dillying around…I pulled the trigger and tried my first paid promotion on X.
My experiment’s result was…less than ideal
A few hours after the promotion had started…nothing.
Another few hours later, oh! One person has liked it. Wait up—that’s my partner, who presses “like” on everything I post. 🥰
That evening, I checked the article again. 40,000 impressions! That’s a lot of eyeballs. Yet…it had 1 reshare, 2 likes and 0 comments.
Hmm. Something was wrong. Then I noticed, I had 3 new message requests. Two appeared to be from bots. But, one of them was most definitely a response to my article.
Here it is for your reading pleasure:
I didn’t respond.
Not that I had a say in the matter, mind you. Apparently, my work had offended this individual so much that they’d taken the trouble to block me for it.
Oopsie Whoopsies! I ignored one of my own mantras.
I’d call it a great success, in that I’ve earned my first Twitter detractor, but that would be a lie. I’ve actually earned the ire of people on Twitter before. Just not this directly, and certainly not this proactively.
Naturally, such a response made me a bit despondent. But I did some digging into how X’s promotion actually works. As I understand, it will amplify a piece of content—to a wider audience beyond just followers—who it thinks might be interested in that content.
But if it can’t confidently figure out who the content is for, it simply propagates it to everyone.
There are a lot of people starting businesses who are on Twitter who would benefit from an article like that. But there are even more people who aren’t starting businesses. Most people who saw my article in a blind promotion would have been from the second category, meaning I’d flouted one of the rules I so often tout myself:
The volume of traffic will not save content being shown to the wrong people.
And the biggest irony of this experiment? The article I’d promoted was specifically an article about how untargeted traffic would not prompt growth.
At least you can’t say I haven’t earned that insight now.
Anyway, here it is: my mistake in all its glory. After some tussling with myself, I decided to leave it up as a shrine to an ill-informed experiment I tried one day.
The biggest gatekeeper is still “relevance”
The volume of traffic will not save content being shown to the wrong people.
The takeaway from this experiment is actually nothing to do with algorithms, paid promotions or Twitter/X.
Had my article showed up in front of the right people, they’d have found it helpful.
But when it started showing up for people with no interest in that message, the result was indifference—and, in one case, hostility. I later went on to get one comment on the article from someone declaring, “I’m not reading all that”, which kinda sums it up, really. The lion’s share of people who saw this article in their feed didn’t go on to read it.
With such a bad audience-content mismatch, the quality of the content was totally irrelevant.
Here’s the question we can all ask before trying to propagate a piece of content (promotions, ads, etcetera): Who would actually be disappointed if they missed out on this piece?
For anyone who fits into that answer…target them with it.
And for anyone else…they’re not going to care, irrespective of how “good” the content actually is. Any effort you spend reaching them is a waste.
So I can take some light solace in that my post didn’t flop because the writing was lousy (…at least, such is the hope).
It flopped because I was hoping the wrong people would take notice.
And it’s a mistake I’d rather make once, visibly, than quietly repeat forever.
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I love this take! If your business is trying to solve a problem, it doesn't matter how many people know about you if the people with that problem aren't among them