A few days ago, as I was browsing the web I ran across one of the most eye catching articles in a while.
It’s one of the most biggest case studies ever driven lately by Buzzsumo.com that approaches which are the most engaging phrases that make your site visitor interested in what you have to say. It’s interesting to see how different arrangements of words can make people take action, and in this article we will try highlight some of the most interesting aspects of them.
Now let’s see which are the top headline phrases measured by average Facebook engagement. According to this chart we can see that phrases like “will make you” is two times more engaging than
“this is why” or “can we guess” type of article titles.
So, why is this three word phrase so powerful? It’s somehow intriguing because this phrase only has the role of linking ideas toghether. It’s not a stand alone type of phrase nor it doesn’t start or end a headline, but it rather makes explicit the linkage between the content and the potential impact on the reader.
The effectiveness of this headlines format sets out why the reader should care about the content, because it promises that the content will have a direct impact on the reader, often times determining him to take action based on an emotional reaction.
Buzzsumo says the headline is clear and to the point which makes it elegant and effective.
Interactions on Facebook are driven by Emotional Headlines.
During the analysis, it came out that emotional phrases were consistently effective on Facebook as measured by the number of interactions, along with engaging photos or video content.
Here are some few examples of emotional headlines, according to Buzzsumo’s analysis:
• Tears of joy
• Make you cry
• Give you goosebumps
• Is too cute
• Can’t stop laughing
In May 2017 Facebook announced it will demote “headlines that exaggerate the details of a story with sensational language” and which aim “to make the story seem like a bigger deal than it really is.”
Also readers’s engament tend to be driven by curiosity and voyeurism. That means that headline phrases that provoke curiosity will gain more engagement on Facebook. Here are some examples of curiosity induced headlines that may sound like this:
• What happened next
• Talking about it
• Are freaking out
A lot of these type of phrases which are included in headlines are clickbaits and are demoted by Facebook.
Other engaging headlines could take the form of:
• Explanations (this is why…, the reason is…)
• Quizzes (can we guess…, only x in…)
• Tribal headlines (x things only…)
These types of phrases are also linked strongly to curiosity.
Ok, now that we’ve found out which are the emotional and curiosity driven tendencies that makes a reader to take action, it’s time to discuss next about a list made by Buzzsumo with some of the worst performing phrases that have the lowest Facebook engagement:
Besides these ones, there’s also a top of phrases to start and end headlines:
Another important aspect of a headline is finding out which are the most popular first words that start headlines by average Facebook interactions.
In this analysis, the people at buzzsumo also looked after the most shared two word combinations or bigrams. Some of them were part of longer three word phrases that were previously identified (like “make you”- part of “will make you” or “is why”- part of “this is why”).
However, there are a few exceptional two word phrases that gained a high level of average engagements: For example:
• “goes viral” - 9,746 average engagements
• “most beautiful” - 3,921 average engagements
How many words should be in your headlines? More than you think…
Just look at the length of your headline. Some experts have argued that the best headlines for news sites are very short. However, by contrast, other research suggests that a 16-18 words headline is optimal for driving engagement. Also, when it comes to email subject lines, research by MailChimp suggests that it doesn’t really matter how long subject lines are.
These assumptions were put to test and the number of words in article headlines were plotted, and the results are on the chart below.
How did we decide on the Headline for this Post?
When this research was made, specifically large research projects in the marketing sector were mainly taken into account, and the outcome was that phrases like “ we analyzed” and “we learned” worked really well as a structure.
How To Analyze Headline Phrases
If you want to do some analysis of headline phrases for yourself, you can use Buzzsumo and type in phrases such as “can we guess”. This will generate a list of results with the most shared articles with that phrase in the headline and display the share counts from each network and the number of linking domains.
If you want to find out more details about this subject matter about the most shared headlines, check out the full article on http://buzzsumo.com/blog/most-shared-headlines-study/.
Thanks for reading and I hope that you found this article useful and we wish you good luck with finding your perfect headline !
The InternetMarketer Team