S3: E5: Writing for Social Media

Transcript

Lucy Mowatt: Welcome to season 3 episode 5 of the Content Conversations podcast.

In this episode, I’m speaking to Jordan Domin-Goddard, a social media expert and founder of Curlyworm Creative.

During our conversation, we delve into how writing for social media differs from other types of writing, and why creating content for your personal social media channels is so different to writing for business.

We also explore why having a strategy is vital to creating content – and why unpopular opinions could be the key to driving greater engagement.

So, without further ado, here’s my conversation with Jordan Domin-Goddard.

Lucy Mowatt: Hi Jordan, welcome to the Content Conversations podcast.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Hello. Thanks very much for having me.

Lucy Mowatt: Before we get into the nitty gritty of social media marketing could you just introduce yourself to the audience and a bit more about what you do?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yes, so I am Jordan Domin-Goddard. I did not think that through when I got married! I run Curlyworm Creative. We are a boutique social media and content agency based in Norwich. We work with clients all over the world on their social media and content and we are all freelancers. So myself included. I have a little team of freelancers, which means that we kind of pick up as little capacity as we want and as we need.

Lucy Mowatt: Sounds like a really nice business model; gives you lots of flexibility.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Hmmm.

Lucy Mowatt: So I think before I wanted to get into creating content for social media itself. I just wondered if you could maybe talk about the difference between managing maybe a commercial or business account versus a personal account.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yes, with a personal account you obviously can post whatever you want. Whenever you want. It doesn’t have to have a strategy behind it. it can be your dogs, your breakfast whatever. With a business account. Obviously, you need that strategy. You need to have a clear idea of what you’re trying to get from your social media, but also how it ties into your overall business goals and where you want it to ultimately lead. So, I always kind of ask people when they, approach me about working with them, or talk to me about social media.

I ask what’s the point? What are you trying to get from this? Because that will drive everything that you do and it can still be fun. It doesn’t have to suck all the joy out of it, but it’s just something to bear in mind and how it all fits in with your brand how it all fits in with your business goals. And yeah, like I said, where you’re trying to go with it.

Lucy Mowatt: We do sometimes see that when potential clients come to us and they say we want to be on Reels and we said that’s great. But what’s the strategies behind it? Because saying you want to be on Reels is not a strategy.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: No, exactly. And shareable content and meme-style content is really good and it can be entertaining and it can be fun but not for the sake of it. It has to fit in with your business goals and you need to have a strategy and Reels is not a strategy. They’re just a form of content.

Lucy Mowatt: Yes, it’s a platform to put your content on but it’s not a strategy.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, exactly.

Lucy Mowatt: And so when you come to creating content and writing for social media platforms, how does that differ from writing for other platforms? What are the considerations you make before you put fingers to keyboard?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: So when you’re sort of doing more traditional marketing writing, let’s say a blog for example, there’s word limit, no character limits. People are kind of either gonna read it or they’re not. It’s very much an evergreen style of content.

And you can kind of put as much information in there as you want. Obviously, there are best practices and stuff that you should follow. But when it comes to social media, it really is about getting people’s attention straightaway. That first line, particularly with a caption, is so important because that’s the thing where people are going to decide immediately if they want to read it or not. So that is really where you have to know what you want to say and put it in that first line and grab people’s attention and stop the scroll. I know it’s a very cliched thing to say ‘you have to stop the scroll’, but it’s true.

It’s so important and then obviously you’ve also got to factor in character limits. So for example, on Twitter, you do have quite a short character limit in particular. X not Twitter anymore! I don’t think I’ll ever remember to call it X straightaway.

Lucy Mowatt: I think everybody is just sort of referring to it as the channel-formerly-known-as-Twitter.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: And so on that channel there’s a very concise character limit. And that’s a character limit, rather than a word limit, which is the other thing that tends to trip people over. And then we’ve sort of Instagram and the other platforms; you do still have a character limit, but it’s much much longer.

Interestingly, quite a few studies have shown that either super-short, one or two sentences, or really, really long, like touching the character limit, captions work best. The kind of in-betweenie ones tend not to do so well, which is interesting I guess because that kind of captures… I’m very much in the first camp where I’d rather read short and sweet, but then I guess there are people who would much rather read something longer.

Which makes sense. I think it is important to bear in mind when you’re writing for social media is it has to be snappy. It has to be interesting and engaging and you need to sort of use fewer words to say the same point, which can be quite difficult as well. I often brain dump and then really heavily edit out and it looks a bit sparse, but that’s what you’re going for.

Lucy Mowatt: I definitely find that as well, especially if I’m writing for X. It would be a case of ‘right what are the points?’ I want to get it all down. Then take out as many words as I can.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Exactly and stuff that you wouldn’t normally do using an ampersand instead of ‘and’ stuff like that. That’s not normal practice on other forms of written content, but you have to do it because it’s part of the character limits.

Lucy Mowatt: I just wanted to go back and touch on something you said about the scroll stopping first line, or I think of it as a headline. Are there any things that you think work particularly well in terms of stopping people?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: I love that you call that a headline. I call it a hook. I feel like everyone has a different word. So for that, it tends to be unpopular opinions. I’m sure you can imagine that works quite well. Things like questions as well, they’re particularly good because they do tend to prompt people to want to engage. What I often find is, if I have a question at the start, I then repeat the question at the bottom. That actually does help with engagement. Even if it’s slightly reworded.

Or stuff like, ‘I know ‘Things I never thought I would know about blah…’ or that kind of thing, where it’s kind of clickbait. But not to the point where someone who reads it is going to think ‘that was a waste of time’. It’s enticing more than it is clickbait. Because clickbait is what it says on the tin, wishy-washy nothing articles with a very catchy headline that actually has nothing to do with the article. That’s really what you want to avoid because people will click to expand the caption, realise it’s rubbish and then not want to go any further or not want to read anything else that you write. So that will bite you on the bum. But having that sort of enticing hook or headline will work usually work quite well. So yeah, I would say questions and something enticing, and/or an unpopular opinion.

Lucy Mowatt: Is there a balance to be struck with businesses doing that? I can just think of a few clients we have where, if we put an unpopular opinion, we would never get it signed off. Do you have any tips for a business perspective about how you’d handle that?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yes, so there’s unpopular opinions and then there’s unpopular opinions I would say.

I have some clients who really love to push the limit of that, but that fits with their branding. It goes back to that fitting with your branding piece and that really fits with their branding their brand is quite sassy, it’s a little bit in your face like that kind of thing. But then I also have another client who is in medical access. They help pharma companies sign off from governmental organisations across the world to get their drugs onto the market.

There’s not really a short way of saying that. They obviously really really don’t like anything that’s going to push the boundaries too much because they have to stay quite impartial. So, for them, anything that’s unpopular opinion is much higher level much more kind of fluffy is what I would say. So there is a way of doing it.

It could be silly. It doesn’t always have to be serious. For example, if you had a product business it could be something silly like unpopular opinion: our phone cases make great hats or something like that for example where you’re putting a silly spin on what is a very normal everyday product that most people have. But again it would have to fit with the branding.

I think that’s really key with social media is, not just doing things for the sake of it and not just following trends or doing certain best practice things because that’s what you should do. But because it fits and it will ultimately help. Circling back to what I said at the beginning it will help with your sort of overall business goals. I think that’s really important.

Lucy Mowatt: Yeah having that strategy in mind when you’re creating the content is obviously vital and it’ll help steer how you formulate that content. I was just thinking that you were saying about branding, how do you incorporate tone of voice? Are there any tips? Do you have a document with to keep that in mind?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yes, so when I onboard people, part of the onboarding process that we have, and this has very much come about through trial and error, is we do a one-hour onboarding call where we go over tone of voice, we go over the visuals. And that’s not just colours, logos, that kind of thing.

Again using a client as an example, we have a client where they really like, and as part of their brand, sort of aerial shots and climbing shots and that kind of thing because the whole thing is that they help elevate your brand. It all kind of plays into that. So those are the sorts of things that we talk about in the call as well as all the normal stuff like colours and logos and blah, blah, blah.

And in terms of voice, if somebody has a tone of voice document, obviously that’s always a good starting point, but actually talking to them about really simple things like, do we use an Oxford comma? Do we not use an Oxford comma? (I’m camp Oxford comma all the way, by the way!)

Lucy Mowatt: No! I’m anti it in most situations. I’m against it.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: That’s so funny. Yeah, but it’s stuff like that. And it’s also abbreviations. Do we need to spell out the abbreviations? Do we not need to spell out the abbreviations? Maybe we spell out once and then not all the way through. And it’s stuff like that. And I think having conversations with people about their tone of voice is more valuable than just being given a tone of voice document.

We’ve all done it, you have a total voice document, you go through that whole process and then that actually evolves as different people get their hands on it. That doesn’t mean you should throw the tone of voice document away, but it’s more that it gets added to. ‘When we write about this particular thing, we say x y z’, and that sort of thing.

It could be things about whether or not you include emojis and what sort of emojis you include because actually they are a tone of voice thing. Even though you might not necessarily think about it in that way, but the emoji that you put can massively change the meaning of a sentence. It’s all those sorts of things and I think talking to people about how they speak helps translated it across to social media as well.

If you were doing it for yourself, I would just literally write down all of the different things, like are Oxford comma or not Oxford comma? Are you emojis or not emojis? That kind of thing and to give yourself a bit of a brand guideline, brand tone of voice even just a very brief one.

Lucy Mowatt: In any role I’ve ever had, with any client I’ve ever worked with, I set up a working doc. If there isn’t anything in existence, you can make notes as you get feedback for what to do next time. Actually something someone recommended to me recently, if you’re not sure take some of old posts and put them into ChatGPT and ask it to summarise what it thinks the tone is and it will give you a rough guide to that tone so you can come back to it. Or if you’re briefing someone else, you can go back and say ‘right,this is how I want it to sound’.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: No, that’s a good tip. I haven’t thought of that.

Lucy Mowatt: Yeah. It was just one of those little time-saving things. That was quite interesting.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, because sometimes it is harder to explain to somebody. Especially when it’s your own business, or a client that you’ve been working on for a long time, it becomes second nature? So actually that’s a really good tip. It’s almost like getting a third person’s perspective, isn’t it?

Lucy Mowatt: Yeah you do. I think if you’re creating content for someone all the time, it becomes second nature and you think, actually they probably wouldn’t use the winky face emoji, but you haven’t got it written anywhere.

Lucy Mowatt: In terms of engagement, do you have any recommendations about how to make captions and content more engaging on social? Because, obviously, that’s what we all want with the algorithms.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: So this is gonna sound very repetitive, I’m sure, but ask yourself what the point is. I don’t advocate posting for the sake of posting. Yes, it’s important to be consistent, but there’s a difference between consistent and just posting because you think ‘goodness, it’s Monday morning and I always post on a Monday’. So just asking yourself what the point is. Is it entertaining? Is it informative? Is it adding value?

Those are the three, I guess, topics or fields or whatever you want to call them that need to be covered. At least one of them should be covered and then in terms of eliciting engagement. Like I said, if you have a question at the beginning repeat that at the bottom. That’s really good for encouraging engagement.

I’m not a huge fan of these like, share and comment things because that feels a bit impersonal and a bit too corporate. I think the longer we’re all on social media the more people see through those things. So I would say just try to keep it as engaging as possible. I know how do you make it engaging? I mean trying to make it interesting as possible. And it can be as simple, as I said, as just including a question at the bottom or something, asking for people’s opinions. Don’t be afraid to ask for engagement. The worst thing that’s gonna happen is no one more comment, in which case, it’s not the end of the world. That type of post maybe isn’t the best for engagement. It’s not very imaginative my answer, but it’s true.

Lucy Mowatt: I agree with you. Going back to your strategies and your business objectives, what do you want that social post to do as part of those objectives? Are you trying to raise awareness? Are you trying to build engagement and build that relationship with your audience? In that case you might want them to comment or leave an answer or click a link or whatever. But as you say, don’t post for no good reason.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, and it might be like a raising awareness post isn’t always going to have an engagement piece to it. It can depend on the content as well as your business goals.

Lucy Mowatt: Do you have any thoughts on hashtags for surfacing content? Just on that brand awareness point. Do you have any particular thoughts? Sometimes I see people using hashtags that I wouldn’t use.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: I’m hesitating because hashtags are an interesting topic. I think previously, say sort of, even two-plus years ago, hashtags were really, really important for reach, particularly on Instagram. Now they are way less important than they used to be and I think, actually, you can create good content that does reach a big audience without having to include hashtags. And actually, the more we get into the AI-integrated world, the less important I think hashtags are going to be.

Instagram for example has already come out and said that you don’t really need to even use hashtags. I think they recommend 3 now out of 30 because their AI software is so good at scanning what’s in the post, it already knows you don’t need to put them on there.

I used to describe hashtags as indexing markers almost like at a library, but the software that they have now, the AI algorithms, (that’s surprisingly hard to say!) that they use to scan your content… It’s not just the image or graphic, or whatever, it’s also what’s in the caption. It’s so good. You don’t need to tell it what’s in there because it already knows. It’s not going to get it perfect every time.

I think it can be important if you’re just starting out. It can help, but I think much more it’s about the content itself, as opposed to hashtags. They definitely don’t have the same level of importance as they used to.

Lucy Mowatt: And I have to say I don’t know where Facebook is on it. But they were at one point you did use hashtags on Facebook. Then you didn’t, so I kind of lost track on Facebook, but I think even LinkedIn’s changing. Some of the functionality we’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks… you can’t really search hashtags anymore. So I don’t know whether we’re gonna need hashtags on LinkedIn ever.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: I think with Facebook they are still somewhat important. But definitely, like you say, with LinkedIn and with Instagram, in particular, you can’t search hashtags now. I mean, you can search them on Instagram, but it just brings up the same results as if you just searched the word with no hash. And then on TikTok, it’s a slightly different thing. They do still have a place on TikTok. But again, I think the bigger the platforms grows the less important they’re going to become.

Lucy Mowatt: Actually, the AI point is really interesting because, as you say, the platforms themselves can decide what is in your post and who to show it to.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, exactly.

Lucy Mowatt: That’s very interesting. And it’s one of those things that’s constantly changing. I think with social media as well. There’s always so much to take in and so many shifts on each platform.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, definitely. And actually on that, I think it’s really important to try and stay abreast of these things. So I really like Social Media Today because they’re fantastic at summarising these things. But there’s also Hey Orca, I’ve never tried it. But I think it’s supposed to be quite good. I’ve heard a few people recommend it and they’re so good at keeping you up to date with stuff because it literally does change on a daily basis.

I used to do a weekly update on what you need to know on email but they were getting so long that I just gave up because it’s like: ‘Actually other people are doing this better. This is taking me way too much time. You might as well go and read theirs because they can summarise it quicker than I can’. And by the time it came out on a Friday, it was basically out of date anyway.

Lucy Mowatt: Yeah, I certainly get at least a daily email from Social Media Today. And Social Media Examier. Pretty Little Marketer, I like her stuff. She does a good round-up.

And Marketing Millennials, I don’t know if you’ve come across that but there’s often some good content in their emails.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: It rings a bell but I don’t think I’ve ever read it. I will go and subscribe after this.

Lucy Mowatt: They’ve had some great memes on LinkedIn recently, especially if you’re in the marketing world, so I think that’s how I found out about them. What do you think about the balance of creating content that’s promotional versus educational or entertaining? Do you think there’s a perfect balance?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: I think that perfect balance depends on your brand. I think, there’s been some examples of brands over the last few years who’ve lent too much on, for example, the entertaining pillar and it hasn’t paid off how they thought it would maybe. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with that. I absolutely advocate testing. You should definitely do it. But I think there needs to be a good blend. And, the thing is as well, it might be that, as we go through different times of the year different types of content become more and less important.

For example, I’d imagine up to Christmas, obviously, promotional content, salesy-type content is way more important for most product brands. Whereas over the summer, when people are on holiday with their kids or in the garden or at the beach or whatever, they’re not buying as much so you’re not putting as much salesy content out there.

So I don’t really have a cheat sheet for it because it does hugely vary. I’m sorry. I can’t really give you a satisfactory answer to that one.

Lucy Mowatt: I do agree. I think again, it depends on that objective that was defined in your strategy. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to build engagement without audience? Are you trying to sell to them? I think it does depend on where you are in your business and your objectives as well, as you know, what resonates with your audience.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, and actually on that, just because you create a social media strategy say in January, I actually think that needs to be examined every three months or so. In the same way that you do with any sort of business plan, you look at it, maybe quarterly or monthly or however that looks for business, your social media strategy should be tied into that conversation because actually your business goals will change. It would be fantastic if we could create a business plan and a social media strategy and that’s it done. I don’t have to do anything else. While that might make everyone’s life so much easier, but unfortunately, that’s not how it works. So, I would say you definitely need to be refreshing them and looking at them on a regular basis.

In terms of the strategy itself. I would say monthly is the minimum that I would be looking at it. At least monthly but preferably quarterly or something. But in terms of tweaking the content itself, that should be a weekly job.

Lucy Mowatt: Yeah, I typically sort of look having maybe a structure from the month ahead. But producing that content weekly. Coming back to what you were saying about testing is, if you put something out that you find goes particularly well or this particularly badly, it might influence what you’re putting out over the coming weeks.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Also, global events can impact this stuff and God knows there’s enough of them going on at the moment! There’s certain things that you might put together. So I often, with clients, will put together a year planner for awareness days that we want to hit. And we probably do that every six months, I’d say. But there’s certain things where we might need to take one out or add something in or whatever. So it’s having that structure to hang your hat on but you need to have a level of fluidity about it as well. It can’t just be rigid: this is what we’re doing.

Lucy Mowatt: That’s an interesting point about having that planner is certainly what I say is: ‘Okay, we’ve got this plan. We’ve got scheduled content, but we try to leave a couple of little gaps in case anything unexpected happens so that you can shuffle it all about. I’m thinking particularly about when the Queen died and everything got stopped. And we had to backtrack.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: I know so selfish. It was at the middle to the end of the week and all of us marketers were like ‘arrgh’.

But it’s important to bear that in mind, that there are things where no one could have seen that coming. There are elements of surprise to this stuff. And unfortunately, you have to be able to kind of roll with the punches. If that happens then you need to have the ability to slot things in or take things down quite quickly because social media is such a fast-moving entity in itself.

Lucy Mowatt: It is. And it can be hard to keep track of so, having as much planned out as you can in advance allows you the freedom to do stuff on the go, I always think.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah definitely. And it sounds weird to people when you say, planning ahead will give you more time, but it is true. Especially if you have the kind of content where it’s less affected by global events, for example, and you’re… just thinking of a product business… if you’re promoting certain products, they’re less likely to be impacted by global events. So yeah, you might have to move one or take one down to slot something else in there. But that’s quite a nice way to give you that nice structure for the consistency, but with that ability to move stuff around

Lucy Mowatt: You mentioned briefly about testing just a couple of minutes ago. What would you typically be looking for if you were going to test content and how would you go about that?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: It depends on the business objectives. The thing that I would be looking for is that it’s meeting those. So when I first start working with somebody… So for example, I’ll use this client. I’m sure they won’t mind not going to name names … but I started working with somebody, I think it was in October, and they wanted to do a three-month test, because I always say to people what we need to do at least three months preferably six, but a minimum of three months to really see if this is going to work. They wanted to do three months of content. And they wanted to do it on X and they had historically had a lot of success on there. They had a decent amount of followers. Their engagement was pretty good, but they basically just wanted me to take it over for them because they had too much other stuff going on. You know how it is. I, straightaway was like, with all the changes that have been going on with X, I think we might want to look at moving across to LinkedIn. They wanted to give it a go on X. So I was like, ‘okay absolutely we can try it’ and we were at that point tweaking weekly because this was the point where lots of changes were going on on X.

So we were tweaking it consistently every single week based on the metrics that they were getting back. And the things that they were really looking for was to have conversations about bringing people on board because they’re also in the marketing world, so they wanted to have more conversations with people. They wanted an increase in enquiries and they weren’t so concerned about whether those enquiries turned into sales because, obviously they understood that’s kind of down to them, but they just wanted to see those consistent enquiries coming through. And it did not work, as I sort of thought, it just did not work for them.

At the end of November, I was really candid and I just said look: ‘I’ve hit a wall with this. We can’t change anything else apart from the platform and I really think, given your objectives, given the people that you’re appealing to, we have to move over to LinkedIn’. And thankfully he was very receptive and we did that in January. Since then I had a catch-up call with him last week and we’ve still been tweaking, because he hadn’t actually been on LinkedIn before, so it was effectively starting fresh. And so we had a conversation about how he needed to do his outward engagement as well as putting stuff out there. And we had a conversation last week and he said we did ‘I’m glad you pushed me to do that because those enquiries are coming through I am getting conversations happening in the DMs. That just was not happening on X’ . For him it made sense for us to test because it was a known platform that he did have success with before but it did get to the point where we were like: ‘Yeah, this is just not working and we have to try something radically different’, which was moving to a platform he’d never used before.

Thankfully that worked out. Not that it was luck, because I do actually know I’m talking about, but it can be difficult for clients when they’ve had that success previously. It’s quite scary for them to move on to an unknown and that’s our job to help support them through that.

I feel like I went off on a bit of a tangent there. Sorry!

Lucy Mowatt: No totally makes sense. It’s just as you say knowing what that objective is so what the metric is that you’re trying to capture and which way you want it to be going and then you can apply that across different platforms and you can test across different types of content and different platforms and different times a day, even. But what is the metric that you’re looking for? That’s what I saw try and do is compare apples with apples. So it makes this something relevant across both.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, I swear it’s like an old proverb or something. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it’s always going to fail. It’s the same thing. You have to know what you’re measuring and know what the actual realistic outcomes are. And then apply a strategy that are going to meet those two things.

Lucy Mowatt: And as you just said, I think with the social media platforms changing as much as they are as well that does make it harder. You do have to be quite agile in how you test and being prepared to change as you say and look at maybe taking a slightly different approach.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, and that was quite an extreme example. Obviously moving platforms is a big move but it could be as simple as, if you’re doing lots and lots of video content and actually it’s not performing, swap over to carousels or mix it up and do a bit of both. If you’re on LinkedIn and you’re only doing words/captions, without any visual attached to it and it’s not getting the reach or not getting the engagement, try throwing a video out there every now and then. And it can just be as simple as the same sort of content but in a different format.

Lucy Mowatt: Yeah. Play around with it. See what generates the most interest.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be right: ‘let’s throw the whole platform in the bin’.

Lucy Mowatt: And are there any business accounts you think do social media well, that people can go away and have a look at?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yes, so I love Duolingo on TikTok. I feel like that’s one that everybody loves but I think they’ve absolutely smashed that with the their mascot. So so good for brand awareness. If anybody thinks of learning a language, they almost immediately think of Duolingo. So win!

Aldi is another one that everybody loves. I think they’re really, really good it kind of fits with their whole brand. They are on the cheaper end of the supermarkets and that is their whole thing and they’re very no frills, you go in the store and it is what it is, and their social media is kind of a slightly different take on it, but there’s like a no-holds-barred element to it, which I think is really good. I’m sure has probably fed into their market success as well.

And then there’s another one which, really annoyingly, I can’t think of the name of the company right now. But it was a campaign that they ran. I saw it on Instagram, but I think it was across multiple platforms and they made wreaths. Really niche. And these Easter wreaths that they’d launched had been copied, shall we say, by Aldi and the original company basically put out a piece of content being like ‘thanks for the compliment ‘and put a positive spin on it. ‘Thanks for the compliment. It’s really nice that you love our stuff so much you’ve decided to sell your own version of it, but here are the differences’, and then pointed them out. I thought that was really, really good because it wasn’t how other companies have approached the whole Aldi thing. Because Aldi’s gonna do what Aldi’s gonna do, whether or not you like it. They’re going to look for popular pieces and they’re going to put an Aldi spin on them. But what this company did was say’ actually, yeah, you can get something similar from Aldi, but ours are better and a different price point because of XYZ’. Instead of getting into an argument, they went ‘cheers for the compliment. Thank you very much.’ And I thought that was quite a nice way of doing it because I’m sure that was probably not the internal conversation that they had.

Lucy Mowatt: No, I think they were probably cursing. But I think there’s something to be said about maybe authenticity in all three of those examples.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yes.

Lucy Mowatt: I think there’s humour certainly in Duolingo and Aldi and have a very tongue-in-cheek tone of voice. But the third example, that was authentic. Although it wasn’t having a go Aldi, it was still very much saying, this is the difference and we’re not going to just let you steal our ideas.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It’s really bugging me that I can’t remember the name of the company as well. I’m sure it will come back to me later when I’m like cooking my dinner or something.

Lucy Mowatt: Yeah, I’ll see if I can remember it. But yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I always have these brain melts when I can’t remember what I was going to say.

Lucy Mowatt: On the tone of voice thing, I think, Duolingo in particular, is just ever-so slightly more cheeky on social media than the regular tone of voice as well.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, and I think that’s an important point, actually. Your tone of voice can be different on each platform because you’re appealing to a different type of person on each platform. It doesn’t have to be the same. It has to fall under the same broad umbrella, but it doesn’t have to be identical. It can be a kind of slightly different shade, if you like, of the same tone of voice.

Lucy Mowatt: It comes back to the audience and knowing where your audience are and what they’re on each platform for I think. TikTok annd LinkedIn are very different. You would have different messages because the audiences are different.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yeah, and what they want to see on each platform. What are they there for? Most people are on TikTok to either learn something or be entertained. So you kind of need to do one of those two things. Duolingo could have tried to going down the route of teaching but actually that could have become quite dry. How they’ve done it with the entertaining… I think they do some sort of more teaching-style pieces of content, but they really lent on the entertaining thing. That kind of runs through everything.

Lucy Mowatt: And it’s served them very very well.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Yes it has.

Lucy Mowatt: And so we’re just nearly out of time. But before we go where can people find out more about you and what you do?

Jordan Domin-Goddard: So you can find me on LinkedIn, Jordan Domin-Goddard and I share a couple, three times a week and that is sort of it all. Obviously, I have a website as well, which is just curlywormcreative.com.

Lucy Mowatt: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I’ll speak to you again soon.

Jordan Domin-Goddard: Thank you very much.