You’ll never guess what study found are most effective Facebook headlines
IT’S hard to pinpoint exactly when online headlines began to converge on the now-familiar set of tropes that dominate our Facebook feeds, but a good guess might be 2012, the year Upworthy was founded and BuzzFeed’s traffic boomed. “You’ll Never Guess … ”; “33 Animals Who … ”; “What Happened Next”: Listicles and curiosity gap headlines proliferated as sites across the Web sought to mimic the viral success of posts painstakingly engineered to generate likes and clicks on social media.
It wasn’t long, of course, before the tropes became overly familiar, the gimmicks stale. By 2014, Upworthy had already peaked, and the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal reported that the curiosity gap was closing.
Indeed, Upworthy announced in 2015 it was pivoting from viral aggregation to original video content. Yet BuzzFeed has managed to sustain its upward trajectory by continually reinventing itself. And Upworthy’s abandonment of its once-successful formula in 2015 has not proved quite the death knell for social-media growth-hacking that it might have seemed at the time.
A new study of social media headlines from the content-analytics firm BuzzSumo suggests that the curiosity gap remains very much open in 2017. That said, some popu- lar headline formulas appear to be working much better than others these days.
The study looked at 100 million headlines published between March 1 and May 10, 2017 to find the popular three-word phrases, or trigrams, that correlated with the highest and lowest levels of engagement on Facebook. Here are the top performers:
What’s surprising here is just how effective second-person headlines seem to be in provoking reactions from readers. “Will make you” is not only the highest-rated trigram for social engagement, but headlines that include the phrase drive more than twice as much traffic as any others in the study. (Note that the study’s author, Steve Rayson, told me it included only those that appeared in headlines on at least 100 different domains.)
Typical “will make you” headlines, according to BuzzSumo, include “24 Pictures That Will Make You Feel Better About The World” and “What This Airline Did For Its Passengers Will Make You Tear Up – So Heartwarming.”
At first glance, the key commonality seems to be the direct appeal to readers’ emotions, which was one of Upworthy’s founding insights. The importance of emotion in a Facebook headline is underscored by the presence on the list of phrases such as “are freaking out,” “tears of joy,” “give you goosebumps,” and “melt your heart.”
But BuzzSumo’s Rayson pointed out to me there is a second genus of “will make you” post that also performs extremely well: the productivity/life-hack listicle. One of the most-shared headlines in the whole study, for instance, was “10 Graphs That Will Make You Pro at Cleaning Anything.” (Ten, incidentally, is the optimal length for a listicle, according to BuzzSumo’s data.)
This suggests the secret to the phrase’s success lies not only in its appeal to emotion, but also in its explicit promise to impact the reader in a specific way. These headlines work, in other words, by acknowledging the transactionality of the relationship between publisher and reader: You give us a click, and here’s exactly what we’ll give you in return. Another way of looking at it: These headlines make the story about you, the reader, rather than about some third-party subject.
Interestingly, the phrase “what happened next” – one of the most infamous of the original Upworthy clichés – still seems to resonate, making the list at No 20.
By focusing on trigrams, BuzzSumo appears to have followed a similar approach to that employed by Max Woolf in a 2015 post that looked exclusively at BuzzFeed headlines. Yet whereas Woolf went deep on a single site, BuzzSumo did the opposite, including in its analysis no more than one headline per trigram from a given site in order to avoid overweighting posts from the most popular publishers.
This led to some significant differences in the results: Whereas BuzzSumo identified the most popular listicle length as 10, Woolf found that the best-performing BuzzFeed listicles were much longer, often upwards of 30 items.
Still, the trigram results should be familiar: the top headline phrases in Woolf ’s 2015 analysis were “Character are you,” “before you die,” and “you probably didn’t.” Again, the word “you” is in all of them.
This study might read as depressing to those who had hoped the worst of the headline-gimmick era was behind us. But there are at least two good reasons not to weep for the future of journalism and online discourse.
The first is that the study doesn’t tell us much about the relative prevalence of headline clichés on the Web today versus any other point. Because the study only includes phrases that appear in headlines on at least 100 sites.
The second consolation is that headline clichés have existed for just about as long as headlines have.
Today’s social media headlines may appear gimmicky, and no doubt some still are. But when a gimmick endures after the novelty wears off – when it proves resilient to the changing tastes and algorithms and market conditions – eventually it’s no longer a gimmick.