Analyzing top headlines: Which words stand out?

There’s a lot to glean from here, and everyone has a unique way of implementing data like this on their site. Although you can interpret this data any number of different ways, here are my top observations.

You and Your

Content’s No. 1 goal is to help other people. This is evident in the viral headlines examined here. “You” was the No. 5 most popular word, and we find “your” in the Top 20 as well. Combined, these two pronouns appeared in 16 percent of all the headlines in this study.

What does this say about viral headlines? They seek to add value for you, the reader. Make content about the reader, not about the writer.

You and Your examples from the study include:

• What Would You Buy With an Extra $12,000?
• A Chart About Silence That Will Leave You Speechless
• 6 Things You Need to Know Today

Academic research supports this concept. A Norwegian business school experimented with different headline structures, including referential headlines, rhetorical headlines, and declarative headlines. They found that question headlines referencing the reader were the most effective.

This

The power of “this” is in its specificity. When you use “this” in a headline, the reader’s mind switches to a concrete view of whatever you’re talking about, as if the object in question were imminent and attainable. There is an immediacy to the word.

See these three examples of headlines from the study:

• This Guy Sticks Household Objects in His Beard and It’s Weirdly Mesmerizing
• This Woman’s Massive Instagram Following Helped Her Launch a Business
• Is This the Airport of the Future?

What, Which, and When

What do all these words have in common? (OK, I kind of gave away the answer.) They are all about questions.

Here are some examples of question headlines from the study:

• Which Countries Pay Its Teachers What They’re Worth?
• Which Old-School Pro Wrestling Legend Are You?
• What Happens When a Dump Truck Going 50mph Hits a Military-Grade Concrete Barrier?

Copyblogger’s Jerod Morris has preached the value of question headlines before, and his conclusions are definitely supported in this study. What are the advantages of headlines as questions?

It turns out that phrasing headlines in the form of a question … does indeed increase click-through rates. In fact it more than doubles them, on average.

Why

This one, too, could be about questions, but digging deeper into the individual instances of “why” in viral headlines revealed that there’s more here: “Why” promises an explanation. Here are some examples:

• Why Your Brand Shouldn’t Fear Assigning Authorship
• Why So Many Creatives Love Working on Trains
• Why the Best Social Media Education Might Be Right Under Your Nose

Finding out “why” is satisfying to us because of a phenomenon called the curiosity gap. Carnegie Melon University professor George Loewenstein coined this term to describe the gap between what we know and what we want to know. This gap creates something like an itch in your brain, and it can only be “scratched” by learning more (and thus, clicking on the post).

Upworthy cofounder Peter Koechley says the site uses the curiosity gap to create headlines that tells the reader enough to pique curiosity but not enough to give the whole story away.

And these headlines play a huge role in the virality of Upworthy content.

Source: bufferapp.com