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....
Can you pass this BuzzSumo headline test? Not as easy as it looks.