.A story well-told captures and holds the attention.
It can be any form, any length - from long-form copy to a well-timed quip made on social media. We see how successful brands with strong voices such as Wendy’s can utilize storytelling on a platform as concise and ephemeral as Twitter.
That is something I’ve long been interested in. Can you build an audience slowly, and organically on twitter by emphasizing good storytelling rather than chasing the trending topics as so many brands do?
Testing my hypothesis, I established a Twitter account based on the late British comedy actor Kenneth Williams. A well-known figure in British popular culture, Williams is also well known for keeping a famously acerbic and hilarious diary.
I set up an account @WilliamsDiaries to publish daily tweets from the Williams Diaries on the anniversary they were written.
What I was interested in seeing was by just following a few select twitter accounts if this account could organically grow through its content’s strength.
By being a British pop-culture icon, Williams is in many respects a strong brand in his own right - although he would be mortified to hear me refer to him as such - but it is his concise way with words, quips that cut deep, that results in perfect twitter content.
Although slow at first, the account soon grew and grew. It now has a twitter following of over 25,000, including the UK’s Culture Minister as well as UK actors such as Nick Frost, Rob Brydon, and Richard E. Grant.
The Telegraph (the UK’s biggest selling broadsheet) even included it in their 100 twitter accounts to follow https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/10504022/Who-to-follow-on-Twitter-100-recommendations-for-a-rounded-timeline.html
The learning from this experiment is that stories well told is key; don’t chase after conversations, start them.
