As part of our SEJ interview series, Syed Balkhi of OptinMonster joins us to discuss the basics of writing great headlines that get shared on social media.
The headline may be the most important part of your content because it’s what creates a first impression for the reader. If the first impression isn’t good enough, it may be the last impression because they might choose not to read any further.
Headlines are constantly evolving. You would never see the headlines that get shared now being used a few years ago. Here are some of the changes Syed is seeing:
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- People used to write headlines to please search engines, now writers are more focused on creating headlines to entice readers.
- Headlines are now written more to trigger emotion because those are the types of headlines people will want to immediately share on social media.
- To trigger emotion you frequently have to write headlines that exceed the suggested length of 50-60 characters. Some of the most shared articles now have headlines that exceed 100 characters.
- Syed is seeing the length of a headline doesn’t really matter as long as it’s enough to trigger an emotion. The better the headline the more interaction it will get, which will in turn help you in the search engines.
- Do what you need to do in order to trigger the curiosity of readers.
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