Social Media Influence Starts With The Headline

Cropped shot of a young man reading a newspaper in a cafe

This story was originally published by

Mention business, tech, or news in your social headline, there's just a 14% pchance it'll go viral.

B&T Magazine by B&T Magazine



When it comes to earning greater social media influence, headlines matter—and new research from CoSchedule proves that not all headlines are created equal.

CoSchedule, a social media editorial calendar for WordPress, mined its database of more than one million headlines to find what makes one headline more apt to be shared compared to another. The company found that 85 percent of the world’s most viral content focuses on topics like food, home, and lifestyle. On the other hand, topics like business, tech, and news accounted for only 14 percent of highly shared content.

“The takeaway here is very simple: readers share content that reaches them in a personal and human way,” CoSchedule’s Garrett Moon said on the Buffer blog.

CoSchedule also analyzed how specific words and tone in a headline impacts shares. The Advanced Marketing Institute’s free Headline Analyzer Tool counts the number of emotional words used in a headline and assigns it an emotional value score. CoSchedule found that headlines with a higher emotional value score were shared more frequently than those with lower scores. Even among popular blogs like Upworthy, the most viral posts had more emotional headlines than those that were shared less often.

Read the full piece here.




Latest News