Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Do you know what the average attention span of a reader is today? It’s 8.2 seconds. You read that right. The average attention span of someone visiting your page is less than it takes you to drink a glass of water. You have less than 10 seconds to convince your readers that your content is more than good; you have to convince them that it’s remarkable.

Luckily, you can make your headlines way better if you pay attention to a couple of simple rules....

Your headline will determine the success of your article.This is something that Vincent Musetto, a former editor of the New York Post who passed away in June, knew to be true -- even when newspapers were only products of paper and ink. He was a master at structuring sentences and organizing words into wacky, surprising, and memorable ways. 

Consider his most famous headline: Headless Body in Topless Bar

Or his personal favorite from his work: Granny Executed in Her Pink Pajamas

I wouldn't hesitate to click. According to a study from Upworthy -- a site with a polarizing headline formula -- traffic to an article can vary by 500% based on the headline. ...

Our tweets average 100 to 150 clicks each. These headlines? They routinely pull in 200+ clicks every time we share them.

Here’s a peek at the Twitter Tips for Beginners headline, shared in the past 90 days....

The most direct way is to catch readers’ eyes is with a provocative headline. We’ve looked at headlines before, looking at how publishers can optimize theirs for social and the best practices for headlines on Facebook.

Knowing the headlines that work gives your content the best possible start to attracting attention on social.

Armed with years of social media metrics, we turned to NewsWhip Analytics to analyze how headlines of ten top publishers has changed in just the past two years. Let’s take a look....

To clear the confusion and help you create headlines that will capture the interest of your target audience, we’ve put together a new guide, How to Cook Up a Killer Content Marketing Headline. In it, you’ll find an outline of the most important rules, along with some suggestions for  spicing up your efforts once you’ve mastered the basics.

But to get you started off on the right foot, I’ve put together some additional tips and tools that you can use to generate unique headlines, evaluate how well they perform, and attract your target audience without having to resort to sneaky tactics that may turn off readers....

The 28-page paper reports findings on clickthrough rates, engagement and conversion drawn from a number-crunching study of 3.3 million headlines from paid links. (Outbrain is a content discovery platform, meaning it puts sponsored content in the path of website readers. It’s new media advertising, basically.)

The data is pretty damn shocking…… and confusing… and frustrating… and counter-intuitive…

It flies in the face of much of what I teach. And it makes the question I asked in th ase first line of this article, “What do I know about writing headlines?” take on a whole new inflection....