How to write a hot take without alienating your audience
Content marketers love a hot take—a controversial, pot-stirring, conversation-starting opinion or piece of content that includes the phrase “DON'T DO THIS!” or “my pet peeve” or “someone had to say it”. They love it because they know it’s great for engagement.
And hey, talking about what bugs you most in your work or your industry in your content marketing is totally valid and often effective. But the problem that I see is that these hot takes are often delivered with lots of confidence but very little compassion or nuance. Especially on social media where pithy one-liners are king.
Why is this a problem? Because most small business people I know are decent folk who care about what they do and the people they do it for. They’re not out there knowingly doing shitty things.
Most of them are also completely overwhelmed when it comes to writing and creating content for their businesses.
The list of things they've told me they're worried about is contradictory and seemingly endless:
what they write either feels too political or not political enough
they either have no idea what to say or have too much to say
their content either doesn't have enough of their personality or is so full of personality that it feels cringe-y and embarrassing.
Engagement bait-y one-liners only exacerbate their overwhelm, self-doubt and worry.
If these people are your clients/audience and you want to deliver a hot take on what they shouldn’t be doing—AND you actually care about helping them do better—I’d like to suggest a more compassionate and effective way.
Three simple steps to writing a compassionate hot take:
Attempt to understand why they are doing the thing you want them not to do
Offer a better alternative
Consider your tone of voice
On that last point—using a sarcastic, eye-rolling, ‘duh this is so obvious’ tone with this audience is patronising (and will diminish connection and engagement). Maybe save that tone of voice for when you’re addressing big brands that should know better (but choose to do sucky things anyway). In other words, if you must punch, punch up.
Finally, if you're a small business person, the next time you see a piece of content from an expert that makes you feel full of self-doubt and even more overwhelmed about what you're doing, ask yourself, is this person really trying to help me do things a better way? Or are they just sending out the bait?
There are also plenty of experts out there with thoughtful, nuanced takes on poor industry standards and small business practices (for example, Shanny at Wild Spark Copy who is a master at the perfectly pitched hot take. Check out her Instagram posts to see for yourself).