There is Proof: Headlines are Crucial

As an integrated agency and given that people are fed thousands of headlines a day, it is now more important than ever to engage users in shorter bursts. In most cases, people weigh the headline and opening sentences of an article more then ever and now there is research to support this idea. Should you spend as much time perfecting the few words of your headline as on the hundreds of words that comprise your article or blog post? The answer is absolutely, yes, according to a new study by OTOInsights. Using an atypical combination of social media and neurological marketing research, the research looked at how users responded to digg entries using eye-tracking and physiological signals (heart rate, breath rate, body temperature, skin conductance) as well as more traditional survey methodology. Basically, what the readers focused on and what they mostly ignored, is what makes this interesting. The study looked at the four major components of each digg article: The “digg button” (showing the number of diggs), the headline, the description, and the image that was associated with the article. According to the study, the digg button and the number of diggs associated with each article are the least important factors for viewing and promoting the content. In the rare cases where the number of diggs reaches an extreme high (4,000+), was it considered by readers to be valuable criteria. For the majority of articles, readers spent no time considering the current number of diggs. Also, the image attached to the article was considered to be of very little value by all the readers when evaluating content. Headlines and descriptions were much more important to readers and commanded much more of their eye-tracking time. The most interesting outcome showed that all participants spent dramatically more time looking at each headline word compared to each description word. Readers were able to view their eye-tracking data and they themselves confirmed the claim that headlines were the single most important factor for influencing their Digg.com behavior. Additionally, readers identified the crucial role of headlines in setting expectations for the associated content. (Social Media for Marketing: An Analysis of Digg.com Engagement and User Behavior by Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, and Tyler Pace.) Successful headlines had some common characteristics:

• Users prefer headlines to be short, direct, and revealing.
• Underestimating the importance of headlines almost guarantees the failure of the submission.

Being an agency with our roots in more traditional media that includes writing headlines for copy and display ads, we understand this practice well and we apply the same practices to our social media campaign. However, this new data reinforces the fact that social media pros have known for a very long time; How critical good headlines are for generating clicks. The new research data provides some additional understanding of how users visually process them. Here are some tips for writing good headlines for the web:

• Is the headline message actionable?
• Does the headline as a question or invite people into a conversation?
• Does the headline convey an overall message?
• Is the headline optimized for search (i.e. specific keyword call-outs)?

Please add to the list if you have any ideas or thoughts.

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