Writing for the web and mastering social media workshops: forthcoming dates

These are the workshops I’m running in London over the next few months:

Friday 24 April 2015 | Frontline Club |
Mastering Social Media with Jon Bernstein | Find out more

Thursday 7 May 2015 | DigitalFWD |
Mastering Social Media for Marcoms | Find out more

Wednesday 13 May 2015 | DigitalFWD |
Writing for the web: the insider’s guide for content marketers | Find out more

Friday 5 June 2015 | Frontline Club |
Writing for the Web with Jon Bernstein | Find out more

I also run bespoke courses. Drop me an email at jon@jonbernstein.co.uk to find out more.

Taking Twitter lessons from the New York Times

Don’t try too hard to please Twitter — and other lessons from The New York Times’ social media desk runs the headline as once again the team behind @NYTimes offer some insights from a year’s tweeting.

Most of the advice is well received. However – as I argue in my latest piece for the Press Gazette – the notion that we shouldn’t try too hard to please Twitter is rather undermined by the example given.

The question implied by this advice is: do print headlines work better than written-for-social-media sells? Using the New York Times’s own example, the answer is yes. But that says more about the pedestrian nature of the digital effort than some overarching rule.

A good online headline or social media sell should combine the wit (either or both meanings of the word) of a newspaper headline with a dash of digital pragmatism.

Read: What New York Times teaches us about Twitter. And what it doesn’t