There’s a new form of blog post going around comprising short, single-sentence paragraphs. Mostly marketing cliché delivered in the smugly impatient tone of know-it-all men, “Broetry” is the perfect material to game LinkedIn.
“I probably average around, 4,000 engagements and 600,000 views per post,” said Fechter. He also stressed that it’s “all organic” traffic and he doesn’t spend a cent marketing the content.
Three online marketers that spoke with BuzzFeed News said that they first noticed the single-line, single-paragraph updates becoming more prevalent on LinkedIn in late September, when copycats began mimicking Fechter hoping for similar success. Since then, there’s been a broem for almost anything: hiring, failing, dating, being single, and fake news. There’s even been broems about broems, like those published by Sam Parr, the founder of business newsletter The Hustle. He published one as a joke. It racked up more than 2,000 likes in a matter of days.
BBC News’ style guide calls for one-sentence paragraphs, which gives its writing a simple staccato authority. This was copied and abused by the various Facebook-gaming viral sites of the early- to mid-2010s, and now some echo of all that has found a new life on LinkedIn, the web’s coldest and most desperate social network.
Many broems read as parodies of things we read last year on Medium: the same life-lessons rooted in cash-fire entrepreneurship, the same anxious performance of wisdom and authority, but in 70 words instead of 700. I figure it all comes from spending 18 hours a day performing marketing or activist roles inside social media fishtanks. Learning all the while that the Branded Self is a gnostic treadmill whose squeaky wheels sound with each desperate footfall a little more like a chanting cartoon duck.