If you’ve ever created a great piece of content that didn’t get the distribution that it deserved you may have wondered why. Why didn’t the subject resonate? Why didn’t the content have more virality? Why did you put so much effort into an underappreciated piece?
This happened to me a few weeks ago when I wrote a piece about how businesses can leverage photos with superimposed text to generate social interest. The article, entitled ” What’s So Special About Junkweb Content?” generated a whopping fourteen tweets, which was a disappointment particularly because the information that I shared could be of immediate value to many businesses that do content and social marketing.
How could an article that was so relevant and useful to its intended audience generate so little interest?
And then it hit me: what is the “junkweb?”
If you’ve never heard the term before the headline might as well have been written in Greek. Readers weren’t ignoring the content, the headline was repelling the readers. Headlines are the most important seventy characters that you write for any piece of content because they are the primary interest generator for your content.
What’s So Special About Junkweb Content? http://t.co/gtbUPa5Tre via @vocus
— Jim Dougherty (@leaderswest) November 25, 2013
Six tools that you can use right now to improve your content marketing. http://t.co/gtbUPa5Tre via @vocus
— Jim Dougherty (@leaderswest) November 25, 2013
Is the importance of headlines platform-specific?
When people talk broadly about anything digital, most people cringe. There’s good reason for this: trying to apply Twitter hashtag conventions to Facebook doesn’t make sense. Trying to apply Pinterest best practices to Instagram is silly, too. Why would headlines be any different? Surely a headline on Facebook is different than a headline on Twitter or discovered by search?
Actually, its not. Whether a reader discovers a piece of content via an email list, on Google, on Twitter or Facebook, the decision to read or ignore is made almost entirely based on the accompanying headline.
Consider the process of search: a user types a term into the search engine and a list appears. Why does anyone click on anything other than the algorithm-provided #1 search result? Because they analyze headlines and determine the most appropriate response to their query. The same process happens on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn: the reader is presented with headlines and then makes a decision whether to dive deeper into the content or to ignore it. It kind of makes my “junkweb” headline seem like sabotage (to the powers that be at Vocus: I promise that it wasn’t).
Like a literary analog to Drakkar Noir, headlines attract a lot of interest. But of course headlines can detract a lot of interest as well.
What have other businesses discovered about their headlines?
There are so many strange social media statistics floating around that it’s hard to keep any of them straight. For any particular tactic, you can usually find disparate “statistics” that tell you to do the exact opposite of one another. That’s why I like to discover the best practices of businesses that are having success implementing these tactics.
Statistics can be broad and misleading (many of these statistics use a biased sample and inappropriately project those findings onto a population of interest), where case studies offer a starting point to take a look at the problem. If there’s one unifying thread for case studies, it is that intuition oftentimes isn’t a good predictor of results.
Michael Aagaard of ContentVerve did a series of tests on landing pages to determine whether headlines were more effective if they asked a question, highlighted a benefit or stated some case for loss aversion. Have you ever heard the adage that nothing is stronger for consumers than loss aversion? In these tests, that conventional wisdom was wrong. Readers prefered the headlines that highlighted a benefit (note that #1 this is a case study and #2 this is of landing pages and not articles which is somewhat important). This test found similar results.
Marketer James Gardner detailed a test of whether congruent language was more important than snappy marketese for landing page headlines (note the previous disclaimers). You may think that the snappy marketese trumped all (as snappy marketese legendarily does). You would be wrong. People wanted their headlines to describe the content that they were going to read. Movexa found similar results when they added the word “supplement” to their benefit language headline, thus describing their product more explicitly.
In just four case studies you see that what worked for one business didn’t necessarily work for another, and that many of the results were counterintuitive to what you may have guessed would work best.
Most businesses optimize their headlines by A/B testing
In one of the most fascinating post-mortem studies from the 2012 Presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s marketing team released the results of email subject lines that they had sent out over the course of the campaign.
The subject “I will be outspent” raised $600K more than the next best headline, and over $2 million dollars more donations than #12. Neither of those figures is chump-change and both reinforce the value of testing, but how does a business test it headlines? As it turns out, A/B testing is a widespread practice for optimizing everything from email subjects to AdWords campaigns to (insert pregnant pause here) headlines.
One of the more innovative examples of A/B testing headlines is used by the Huffington Post. They generate two headlines each of which is shown to 50% of viewers. After x number of iterations, their system defaults to the more popular headline and the other goes off into the cyber-abyss (the cybyss?). This idea inspired a WordPress plug-in that worked more-or-less the same way.
Chris Wilson of freshpeel also reveals an innovative strategy for A/B testing headlines: Use Twitter and a URL-shortener. Of course, sans a willing audience to participate you could easily do the same for test headlines with paid advertisements as well.
Headlines are the most important seventy characters that you write for any piece of content. They are the primary gatekeeper between readers and content agnostic of platforms. Many businesses discover counterintuitive practices, and most businesses A/B test their headlines regularly. Whether measured in social shares, traffic or in revenue generated, there is a lot of benefit to be gleaned by paying attention to and optimizing content headlines.
Trust me, you don’t want to be the guy (or gal) lamenting the virtue of a great piece of content that went unnoticed because of a bad headline.
