What Really Is The Best Headline Length

What Really Is The Best Headline Length How long should my headline be? Youve asked yourself this, and with good reason. In the content marketing world, a lot of  attention has been given to the headline of your blog post in recent years. Theres so much headline information out there, so many dos and donts, so many great tips that youre drowning in advice and you have no idea of what to actually do. You want a definitive answer in the form of a number or at least a firm set of guidelines. You dont want to hear  it depends. The truth is, it does depend. Sort of. It depends on what you want your headline to do. Do you know what you want from your headline? What Really Is The Best #Headline Length? #blogging via @JulieNeidlinger Write The Best  Headlines With A  Free Headline Analyzer The headline analyzer  will help you: Use headline types that get the most traction for social shares, traffic, and search engine ranking. Make sure you have the right word balance to write readable headlines that command attention. See the best  word and character length for search engines like Google and email subject lines, while also seeing  how your readers will scan your headlines. Try The Free Headline Analyzer Now How To Write The Best Headlines The Old School Way There are two schools of thought when it comes to headlines. Traditionally, headlines should be, according to Jakob Nielsen: Short, typically 5 words or less. People dont read very much online. Information-rich. The headline should summarize the article. Starts with keywords. People tend to scan, and read the first words most of all. Understandable, even out of context. Headlines often appear on their own, without articles. Especially in social media and search engine results. Predictable and match reader expectations. Dont frustrate your reader. They should get what they expect when they click. Nielsens shorter headlines arent the label variety. Label headlines are those which are short, but not terribly information rich. For example, a Nielsen headline might be Speeding Car Crashes Into Wall while an uninformative label-type headline might read Speeding Car. I Want My Headline To Perform Well On Social Media The second school of thought, however, is what we tend to see online now. And it seems to be  the exact opposite of what Nielsen says. A headline that performs well on social media is one that people share a lot, and click through a fair amount. But mostly share. The headline is often shared as much as the people sharing it will read. This is a unique situation in headline history. Instead of being helpful in the traditional sense (as described above), headlines are now meant to  invoke curiosity and capture clicks. Write #headlines to invoke curiosity and capture clicks. via @JulieNeidlingerThis is particularly important on social media, where news feeds are quickly cycling through, competition with other headlines is fierce, and you have to pull out all stops to get someone to notice. Long, rambling, and sometimes bordering on bizarre. Headlines now are often quite long and almost a story unto themselves. Though that is shifting somewhat from 2014 (the year of Upworthy-styled headlines), headlines still maintain a longer approach than Nielsen might recommend. Emotion-rich. What the article is about doesnt matter. Emotion does. Keywords are sparse. Few keywords, with more attention given to emotional subtexts. Not much context. Without the article, the headline is a worm on a hook and little more. Rely on shock/emotion/curiosity factor. Readers dont know what to expect, and thats why they click. How does that speeding car headline read for the social media age? How about 5 Reasons You Should Fear That Speeding Car. The social messages that accompany your blog posts wont necessarily be your headline. Youll probably customize them for repeated shares. But if you do rely on your blog post headline to be the body of the social message, then the ideal social message length will matter for your headlines. Buffers Kevan Lee has written a seriously comprehensive blog post about the ideal lengths of just about anything you could put online. Its packed with information on the length of just about everything, but check out what he discovered for the most popular social networks: Twitter: 71–100 characters Facebook: 40 characters Google+: 60 characters LinkedIn:  80–120 characters Depending upon which network you lean most heavily or get the most traction, you should consider making your headline fit the ideal length for that social  network. Within those character ranges, remember the importance of emotions in a headline that does well on social media. Emotional headlines, with specific trigger words, get shared more on social media. I Want My Headline To Do Well In Email Just like social media, you have the ability to customize your emails so that you rework how your headlines appear in the subject lines. But not everyone does. Sometimes the work you put into finding that perfect  headline can carry right on through to your email subject line. So how long should they be? MailChimp, the popular email provider, has stated that it doesnt really matter how long your subject lines are. Last year, we carried out our own tests on how our email subject lines fared. We found that an email subject line with around 50 characters fared the best. The conclusion? Find out what works for you by testing if you dont believe either MailChimp or our results. As you test your headlines in your email to determine what works, remember the difference between open rates and click-through rates. Open rates are not the same as click-through rates. An open rate is the percentage of total recipients that opened the email. In some email software, just by opening their inbox they open emails. The click-through rate is the percentage of those who opened and then clicked at least once. Aim for a high click-through rate as the basis of what a successful headline does, not just an open rate.