7 Things I Learnt at The First CarThrottle Social Media Workshop

After attending the first ever social media workshop hosted by CarThrottle here in London, I decided that I wanted to share what I had learnt with the rest of the CTzens. After some very beneficial presentations by Jason (Engineering Explained), Alex, Gabor and Adnan (CarThrottle) to name a few, we were given the opportunity to talk the guys behind the screen, the guys that brought us this platform, so that we may, as fellow petrol heads around the world come together to share memes of cars and mock douche bag road ragers.

1. Content

One of the most important things that was spoken about was the content that you upload. The first thing that you should think, before turning an idea into something, is whether or not it is releasable for your audience. Why? Simply because relatable content resonates with people’s emotions and we get the sudden urge to have our friends and family experience the same; be it nostalgia or happiness, to shared disapproval or frustration. This means that people will share your content with others that can also relate causing a sharing cycle. Content should also be concise and unique while remaining humorous, ‘cause who doesn’t love a couple of cheap laughs? By remaining concise and humorous you ensure that you don’t bore your audience while making sure that it is unique, means that more people will want to view the content at all.

2. Share things strategically

This basically means that you should already be following all of the big pages that are relevant to what you do and share things that are relevant to your audience (while of course always giving credit to the original creator). After this, make sure you tag the relevant pages where you can, for example; if you have done a review on Need For Speed 2015, then the Need for Speed and EA pages should be tagged on your post because there is that small chance that they might share or retweet your work and on some platforms will increase your chances of coming on the ‘popular’ pages, furthering your reach.

3. "Everyone loves a list"

Like me, you guys probably never gave much thought to the effectiveness of lists but as Mr Engineering Explained, explained “when you get to number 5 or 6 on a list of 9, you can’t help but see what the last few are”. Furthermore, this helps lay out information in a clearer way that caters to both, the reader that is willing to sit there and read all the crap you have written, as well as the reader that wants to skip through and glance over the key points which you have already picked out and displayed it to them. Alex said in his presentation that we should use the “tried and tested list formula” which CT are famous for.

4. Continuous improvement

As long as you stick to your original ideas and style, you should always be looking to make small improvements to your work. From reading more to improve your grammar, to investing in better recording equipment and turning on the lights (looking at you Jason). These small things can make a huge improvement to the quality of your work and with so much other content out there, viewers can be very fussy. So make sure you are always looking to make small changes that will give you an edge.

5. Don't be a sell out

Nobody likes a sell out, nobody. Jason’s work is all about cars and their engineering aspects so he does not do any sponsored work unless the product or company is relevant to cars, or engineering. If he did irrelevant sponsored products he would look like a money grabbing, good for nothing jerk. And viewers are very sensitive about the issue. Hence, you should keep an unbiased stance on any reviews that you do as you don’t want it to look as though you are being paid to make a product look good a.k.a being a sell out. So put simply; be humble, don’t try to be a salesman, and always be unbiased.

6. Headlines and featured images are half the battle

Obviously, you will be using social media to get your content out there but this means brand management. Your pages on different platforms should be aesthetically pleasing so that viewers will want to stay. Ways in which this can be done include making sure that content is native to the platform, displays pictures are relevant and of good quality while the page is generally laid out clearly. A simple example is the car throttle Facebook page where they use their logo as the display picture, a relevant cover photo and captions that are grammatically correct. With regards to native content for specific platforms, this simply means using photos and videos on Instagram, while using short text on Twitter.

7. Use CarThrottle

One of Adnan’s biggest pieces of advice was to use CarThrottle (no he is not a sell out). This is because most social media platforms have already been heavily saturated and if you are joining this late in the game, it will be extremely difficult to get up there with the top dogs. However, CarThrottle is relatively smaller than majority of its rivals meaning you have a bigger chance of getting your work out there and since it is growing fast, you can still aim high.

Thank you for reading my first ever written piece. I hope you have found this piece beneficial and please leave any advice and feedback on how I can improve. :)