Why Rage Posts Get Traction
Charlotte Booth • 5 June 2025
Spoiler: It’s not the rage
There are a couple of reasons why this is the case.
Hitting your target audience
The first is about knowing the audience, whether consciously or not, and expressing something that many people have experience with or thoughts about.
Even knee-jerk rage posts have an audience in mind.
For example, if you have just cracked an alloy in a massive pothole, your post is unlikely to be aimed at the council. Instead, it is aimed at people who share your pain: other motorists who have experienced the same thing who will validate your annoyance.
Hitting the right level of justified rage, will mean your comment section will blow up with similar stories and similar irritation from your audience.
Writing with passion
The second reason these posts are great for engagement is because often they are written as a knee-jerk reaction when the author is in the middle of the emotion. In other words, there is feeling and passion behind the words.
There is no carefully choosing the right words and right placement of emojis or spacing. Instead, it is emotion, passion and authentic feeling. Sometimes in CAPITAL LETTERS.
Which is great!
However, such raw passion shouldn’t be reserved purely for rage posts, as let’s face it, in the current climate we don’t really need more anger.
Instead, channel that passion into something positive, and you will still get engagement because what you’re feeling will be embedded into the content.
Enjoying the process
Think of your favourite topic; the one you could talk about for hours if someone asked you. We all have one of these. Feel the excitement?
Now think of something that doesn’t excite you. Like KPIs or Self-Assessment Tax, or how bunions develop (yes, I know some people love this stuff).
How much easier would it be to write something about your favourite topic? Which do you think would be more engaging for the audience?
This is one of the keys to writing engaging copy – whether a blog, a social media post or a book – being passionate about your subject.
The other key is to enjoy the process of writing.
Professional Copywriters
This is where professional copywriters are weird beasts.
We may not be passionate about the intricacies of everything we are writing about, but we are so passionate about writing as an activity that it almost replaces a lack of passion for bunions, KPIs and Self-Assessment Tax. Additionally for copywriters, researching the subject in order to get the right words, the right feeling and the right message is part of the fun.
For some, having “write blog about tax reform” on the to-do list can cause twitching and extreme procrastination.
For a copywriter this is the total opposite with the excitement building at the prospect of sitting down and writing and crafting a piece of text from nothing.
Your ‘oh no, I have to do this’ is a copywriter’s ‘Yay! I get to write this’.
And that could be the difference between a piece of content which is dull, and as much a chore to read as it was to write, or an engaging piece of writing which gets to the ‘feels’ of your audience.
I know what I would prefer. And what your audience would prefer.
So, if you dread that task on your to-do list why not consider hiring a professional passionate writer. After they have done a little happy dance, they will settle down to write and you will have one less thing to do and content that shines.
I am now curious to learn about bunions, so any podiatrists out there in need of a bunion blog please let me know. I also write a great rage post!!
There is nothing more amusing than checking out mediaeval artistic renditions of lions and other heraldic creatures. These beasts, grimacing and gurning are a strange juxtaposition of human, animal and demon and as far from the cute image of Alex from the Madagascar franchise or in fact a real lion as you could possibly get. There are three main reasons mediaeval lions are so ‘bad’ and un-representational; The artists were following a very tight brief. Some of the artists may never have seen a lion, and were following the descriptions they were given. These lions were representing heraldic principals of bravery, nobility and authority; all very human characteristics. When viewed through this lens it becomes more understandable why they look the way they do, but they are still ‘not right’ and not a great tool for learning about lions. Generative AI is very similar to an uninformed but talented mediaeval artist. There is a element of intelligence but at the end of the day it is following a brief, with no actual ‘knowledge’ of the thing it is producing. As an example, if you prompt your generative AI (ChatGPT and the like) to produce a blog for your new product or service, aimed at your ideal customer avatar you will in all likelihood get a mediaeval lion out the other end. Sort of recognisable, and sort of not. This is because AI doesn’t know what a customer is (ideal or otherwise), has no idea what your product or service is and does, and has no true understanding of how this service or product will serve your ideal customer and their needs. Of course, AI is pulling all the information available from the internet to help with its answer but there is no understanding there. There is no determining fact from falsehoods or even which websites are trustworthy and which are not. So, it skims the internet and puts together content which suits the brief as it understands it. This is then when the actual work should start as this content shouldn’t be used in the raw. It should be edited and tweaked by a human who DOES understand the brief, has been a customer (ideal or otherwise) and can imagine what your ideal customer will feel when using your product or services. We are in a world now, where we have generative AI promoting products and services to humans, when it has no concept of what a human is and how it thinks, meaning the marketing department are in fact more important than ever for ensuring content and copy is aimed at humans and human emotions. You could argue that the world would be a more entertaining place if there were more mediaeval lions in it, but it wouldn’t be a great environment for learning, or for basing purchasing decisions on. If you want to maintain the human element in your content, then I would love to help . Explain the brief, your CTA and your ideal client and I will know what I need to ask to get a clear idea before writing. Then you can rest assured your content was written by a human for a human and we can leave the mediaeval lions to the museums.
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