Pretend, for a moment, that we’re at ceremony for the content marketing graduating class of 2014, and the valedictorian is giving a speech on how headlines came to rule the content marketing world.
What would she say about the past year, when it came to crafting headlines? Why did headlines get the spotlight?
1. They carried the load on social media.
Of all the things people could do online, social media use became the number one activity. We spent more time on social media than we did with our pets, giving up three hours every day, on average, to our social media news feeds.
This meant that our content marketing headlines had to pull a heavy load.
In a quickly changing news feed with limitations on characters and content, our headlines were all fans had to go on. Should they click? Should they share? Should they ignore?
We began looking at words that kept popping up in headlines that went viral on social media. We learned that people shared emotionally, and researched how we could measure the emotional value of the headlines we were creating. There was no shortage of people talking about how to write the best headlines for social media.
