Today, all your content headlines have to do double duty:
Making headlines shareable through social media?
What’s that about?
Well, if your content page headlines aren’t gaining significant traction through social media, you’re missing the boat.
Today, all your content headlines have to do double duty:
First, they have to work on the content page itself. The page headline has to compel attention, hook the reader, and drive readers into the body of the content.
Second…your headlines have to be shareable through social media.
They have to be able to stand alone, away from your page, and jump out the crowd in Twitter streams, on Facebook pages, on Reddit, in RSS feeds and elsewhere. In other words, your headline alone should make people want to share both the headline and a link to your full page or post.
You want to maximize shareability because social media exposure can bring you a ton of immediate traffic, extend your reach to a larger audience, and maybe generate some new inbound links as well.
So how to you do this?
How do you write a content headline that works on your page or post, but also works well in isolation…on Facebook, Google+ or elsewhere?
- Shareability Tip #1: Write your headlines to a maximum length of 80 characters.
- Shareability Tip #2: Mention multimedia.
- Shareability Tip #3: Get NEW into the headline.
These are just three of many ways to make your content headlines more shareable.
Above all, it’s important to recognize that the craft of headline writing is changing fast. The proliferation of site pages and blog posts have a lot to do with this. As does the explosion of social media, and the massive adoption of content via smartphones.
The bottom line is that you now have to write better headlines in order to get noticed, compel attention, drive readership, and build loyalty among your readers.
