Renegade Professional News 

By Kendall Silva

One of the first steps toward monetizing your efforts is getting your message out to your prospects.   Use your discussion posts as a form of advertising by letting people know what you can offer them.

When you create a new discussion thread, you have to give it a title.   This will usually be the only part of your thread people will see when they are visiting that discussion area.  Therefore, it should invite them to click on the title and read more.

The title of your new discussion thread should specifically answer this question:

What kind of value are your prospects looking for?

To answer this question, think like your prospects.   What questions are they asking in their minds as they search through discussion topics and how can you address them in your title?

“How do I _______?”

“Where can I find ______?”

“What happens when _____?”

If your title does not answer this question, then you may not notice much activity on your thread.

Have you ever seen a commercial that caught your attention, but your realized you had NO CLUE what company or product it was advertising?  Don’t let ‘flare’ get in the way of your valuable message.  It’s not about showing off all your fancy tricks.

It’s about letting people know that when they have a question, they can come to you for answers.  The discussion post title is the first place to do this since it’s the first part of your thread that people will see.

If you read a lot of fictional books, you may notice that the titles are artistic in nature.  The Da Vinci Code, The Secret Garden, A Wrinkle in Time, The Giver…  These titles may technically have something to do with the actual storyline, but their purpose is to pull on the emotions of the potential readers.  You may be attracted by the title, but you still have to read the teaser on the back to know what the story will be about.

However, this works for fictional books because the value that the readers are looking for is a fictional ‘vacation’ made possible by a good book and their own imagination.  Therefore, to insult that imagination with an overly descriptive title like, “The Da Vinci Code: Fictional Story about Secret Societies, the Use of Art that Tells of these Secrets, and the Man Who Will Figure It All Out”, would actually take away from the reader’s experience.

In our community, people are not usually looking for artistic inspiration as they do when shopping for a new book.  People want answers because they need help.  Therefore, metaphoric, creative, and artistic titles will not always communicate the fact that people will find valuable answers within your thread.

As an example, I will discuss a thread I started on the Coaching Cognition Facebook page.   I have learned that because I’m a writer at heart, I have to be VERY careful not to get too abstract or artsy with my thread titles.  While there is a time and place for this, even on the Coaching Cognition fanpage, I at least need to be aware of my tendency to make ALL my titles artistic.  And so, I’ll tell you this:  I am learning alongside all of you, and as I learn more, I share more.

On the Coaching Cognition page, I started a thread about taking action.  I started this post due to the incredible activity and discussion surrounding the article “What You Can DO When There’s ‘Nothing You Can Do’”.  I gave the discussion thread a title, which is “If you can’t stop thinking… start doing!”  I liked it.  I thought it was creative and thought provoking.  I even started to include it on my email signatures.

But it did not make a good thread title.  You can read this line and figure out its meaning if you think about it for a second, but if you are skimming multiple thread titles with the purpose of finding answers, you will not be in the right mindset to interpret phrases like this one.

The post itself was about taking action, the difference between ‘inactivity’ and ‘doing nothing’, when it’s okay to stop what you are doing for a while, etc.  Had I given my thread a title that better described its content, (How Do You Know If ‘Doing Nothing’ Is The Right Action For My Business?) more people may have participated.

After all, once they knew they could find value in my thread (or in this case, have a good place to offer value of their own), then my readers would have switched from ‘search/scan mode’ to ‘information absorption mode’.  Once they open the thread, then they would be able to find value in the phrase I had originally used as a title.

They are not usually looking for creativity, but information.   Does this mean you should never post a creative or artistic title that pulls more on emotions than it does logic?  Absolutely not!  There is a time and a place for everything.  If you choose to do this, just make sure you fully understand whom you are trying to attract and what value you want them to get from your post.

For more about how to use discussion threads to move your business to the next level, read “Are You Missing Out On A Valuable Social Marketing Platform?” here on Renegade Professional News.

Then, come over to the place where you can implement or even discuss your social media marketing skills. I have noticed that many of you are becoming more active in the discussion area at Coaching Cognition, so go check it out!

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