Headlines - Text that drives traffic and engagement
Content sells but heading thrive sales number.  Without a reasonably good heading, people don’t bother to read your content. Hard to digest but writing a great heading beats writing great content. Less qualified content tends to get greater attraction because of greater heading. Moreover, it is quite easy to write a catchy heading than to great piece of writing together.
Don’t believe it. Let us see few examples:-
1)Â Â Â Â Â Learn How to Earn Lakhs of Rupee by Day Job?
2)Â Â Â Â Â Is India preparing a war against china?
3)Â Â Â Â Â Launch a business in less than a month.
And for other feel free to contact any newspaper editor!!
Headlines and clickable titles are important for multiple reasons. Some of them are:-
1)Â Â Â Â Â Good Titles help you get higher CTR in search
2)Â Â Â Â Â Higher CTR is always effective when you wish to rank higher and stronger in search ranking
3)Â Â Â Â Â Content with great headlines get maximum shares and thus improvise chances of better organic reach and back links.
So if you are an entrepreneur or growth hacker or a copy editor or a seo expert, scroll down instead of choosing to bounce and exit the post.
At the end of the post, you will have sufficient knowledge that can be used for
·        Blog Post title Writing
·        Facebook ads and other social media ads
·        Email Marketing
·        Push Marketing
·        Job/Event Ads
And everything that has to be with the headlines.
Before we proceed and learn about actual content, let us drill down some of the facts:-
1)Â Â Â Â Â 10% of content get 90% of shares ( clicks , engagements)
2)Â Â Â Â Â Longer Headlines tends to perform better compared to shorter headlines
3)Â Â Â Â Â Topic on polarizing content such as those on self interest, emotions etc dominate the content space.
4)Â Â Â Â Â Marketing power words are myth. Very few of them are useful but the remaining are garbage and nothing else.
Now let us focus on some of the actionable points:
It is widely said that, marketers spend 60% of their time in writing the Headings; however there is very little data to focus on it.
 The 1% of Social Media: - I’m quite fascinated by the Pareto Rule. It is known as the Law of the Vital Few or the idea that most (80-90%) effects come from a few (10-20%) causes.
This has been proven valid across many disciplines and so it is with social sharing.
As per latest research done via various leading content platforms, 20% of headlines get 95% of all shares and social interactions. As we mostly looked at headlines that do get shared, it’s safe to say that general distribution is even more ‘unfair,’ if we include all the headlines with zero or minimal stats.
If you are a marketer it’s always good to break things down further. You’ll find what gives the maximum output and then focus on that in your marketing efforts. To be clear, you can take the top 5% of top performers and find out that the Pareto Rule applies there too. For example, 20% of the top 5% would likely get 80% of all its shares.
Again, it is the case headlines too, as the top 1% gets half of all shares.
So the obvious questions is , What role does the heading plays in sharing of any content ?
Most Social Shares Come From People Who Only Read Headlines
There is a famous saying from the legend of copywriting, Gene Schwartz that the purpose of the headline is to get you to read the first sentence. And the purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second one.
In content marketing, the significance of it goes even beyond that.
At least 59% of social shares and engagements come from people who only read the headline and never bothered to read a single sentence.
This is what a study from Inria on 2.8 million Twitter shares and 9.6 million clicks found out.
So even if your content quite average but your headline is great, most people who tends share it won’t even read.
So why the hell am I editing this piece right now??
Shares Highly Correlate With Links and Organic Traffic
This is quite interesting for all of us.
Most people in our circles disregard social media success because it is seen as short-lived and just a lot of hassle compared to search traffic.
But if you look at the organic traffic of the top shared pieces, social success seems to correlate with search traffic. Type a keyword in Google search, greater chances is result of a particular search will have a fb post or tweet in top 10 of its search result.
Referring to above table, the top 10% of shared content gets about two times or 200% more traffic than the average. And the top 1% gets 357% more traffic than the average.
That’s great but also not earth shattering. It shows that being a hit on social media doesn’t make you a star in terms of SEO either and that most likely there are content formats that do better in social and some that do better in search.
Correlation is not causation folks.
Quick Bites – The Tackaways
It’s quite interesting to see how shares feed well search traffic. It’s almost like social shares, despite the fact that they may not be a ranking factor, can influence your rankings.
So in case you want to achieve the highest levels in SEO, you need good social sharing levels.
As we saw previously, most shares happen ONLY based on the headline (most people don’t even consume the content).
Therefore, even excluding factors like search click-through rate, a great headline can probably be considered a very indirect ranking factor.
Now, let’s dive into what makes headlines better and how you can use these tactics for your own business.
Longer Headlines Perform Better
Length of a headline is positively correlated with social media success. The average length for the 1% top performing headlines is 11.6 words and 70 characters.
Writing a headline that is close to the maximum character count of the network you share it in will generate more shares and click through rate.
Fortunately, there is a way to write different headlines for the most important social networks using special Meta tags.
Facebook and several other networks like Pinterest use OG (open graph) tags. Twitter uses Twitter cards tag.
At the end, let see which topic dominates the Headlines.
Plan your next content better with some witty headline and experience the magic yourself. Will meet soon.