Vent: a guy in a Facebook group told me my ad captions were "shouting at nobody" and I've been mad about it for a year
About a year ago I posted a screenshot of this local furniture store ad in a marketing Facebook group, the one where they crammed like 40 words of ALL CAPS text onto a picture of a recliner, and I was mostly making fun of it. But then this guy commented that MY own gym ads had the same problem and that I was "shouting at nobody." I was furious for two days. Then I pulled up my last 15 posts and he was right. Every single caption was just me yelling SALE SALE SALE with three exclamation points, no story, no reason to care. So I tried something different, I wrote one post that was just about a lady named Deb who comes in at 5am every day to walk on the treadmill before work. That post got more comments than anything I'd run in 8 months, people kept tagging their friends saying "this is you." The funny part is I still see brands doing the all caps fire emoji thing and it makes me cringe now. So what was the one piece of feedback that made you toss out your whole playbook?
Does it bug you that the post only blew up because it wasn't about the gym at all? Like the thing that worked was basically you not selling anything, which almost feels like cheating. I've noticed the stuff that pops off is usually the stuff I almost didn't post because it felt too small.