Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Last summer, we looked at the characteristics of successful headlines on Facebook, parsing the numbers in the NewsWhip database to pick commonalities in the titles of stories that attracted a lot of engagement on the platform.

Our findings at the time pointed to great headlines:

– Being conversational and descriptive,

– Speaking to a personal experience

– Being vivid and interesting,

– Not tricking or misleading the readers.

All of these principles remain the same, especially the last factor, which is now generally de rigueur for any sites looking to seriously develop an engaged and loyal readership through social media. Then at the start of this year, we took another look at headlines that were seeing engagement to see if there were any other obvious trends. Now we’ve identified a few new factors of note for successful headlines on social media, based on the data we’ve seen in NewsWhip Analytics.

As well as the advice we’ve already dispensed around headline etiquette on this blog, here are three more factors to consider when looking to pitch the most effective story description to social readers....

“If you use a poor headline, it does not matter how hard you labor over your copy because your copy will not be read.” John Caples

A good headline is one that resonates with your audience not one that resonates with someone else’s audience. This is why copying a viral headline format that worked on BuzzFeed or Facebook is a bad idea, particularly if you write for a B2B audience.

Our latest research reveals the headlines that resonate with B2B audiences including:

The top phrases that start B2B headlines

The most engaging phrases in B2B headlines

The most shared numbers in business headlines

The top words and topics that resonate with B2B audiences

The optimum length of B2B headlines

Key lessons for business content writers

The research is based on an analysis of 10 million articles shared on LinkedIn. See our methodology note at the end of this post.