If you can’t write well for the Web today, your writing won’t probably be read.
Your title might get a look from friends of friends and your introductory paragraph a quick scan from your biggest fans, but the remaining 100, 500 or 1,000 words you lovingly typed on your keyboard will be ignored for a more promising link.
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FACT: Web content rarely gets 100% of its reader’s attention.
I know that YOU might be attending a business meeting, doing email, answering the phone, watching TV or tweeting as YOU read these lines. Just like YOUR potential readers might when they come across YOUR social media content.
What writing for the Web and social media really means is writing for people with busy lives, differently-sized devices connected to the Web, lots of friends (not a dozen but more like 300 or 5,000) and ridiculously low attention spans.
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Executive summaries were invented to help busy decision-makers grasp the gist of a report without reading it from cover to cover. With the explosion of social media and the multiplication of publishers, everybody on the Web has the information diet of an executive.
That’s probably why Twitter caught up very quickly among Internet power users – and imposed the status update as an essential feature for any social media platform. By squeezing any message in a 140-character format, Twitter put the reader’s need for brevity first. Writers and publishers could only adapt.
The ultimate goal of social media is to build or grow the relationships between your target audiences and your institution. As a result, writing for social media should make your fans talk and your constituents act. But, nothing will happen if you can’t grab their attention with your titles and headlines in the first place.
Whether you write a blog post, a tweet, the title of your YouTube video or a status update on Facebook, if your headline doesn’t do its job, your readers will click elsewhere. They won’t either share your content with their friends, connections or followers.
So, how do you write great headlines for social media?
Learn from others outside and inside of higher education
If you take the time to follow popular accounts on social media, you’ll be able to learn a lot. You can also get some guidance from the research conducted by Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist or by attending the Web Writing Boot Camp lead by Michael Powers next month.
Dan Zarrella at Harvard on January 24th 2011.
Practice, practice – and measure
Use your social media accounts as your own lab. Don’t keep writing the same type of titles. Experiment with questions, numbered lists or how-tos. Then, assess the performance of your different trials to find out how to write great headlines for your audience on a specific platform.
The most important step is to understand that your social media headlines shouldn’t be after-thoughts.
They will make or break your efforts, so learn how to write them and do it fast.
Want to learn how to write to be read on the Web or social media?
Register for Web Writing Boot Camp (May 10-12, 2011): $350 for 3 webinars including writing challenges.
One of the hardest lessons for me to learn when it came to writing for the web was to “un-learn” my habit of always wanting to go for the clever, catchy headline that might work in print but not on the web. Any former print journalist can relate: Clever literary or musical references, puns, and turns of phrase that convey a sort of inside joke to the learned but mean absolutely nothing to those we’re trying to get to read our stuff.
Plus, when writing for the web we need to consider whether our headlines or other content help or hinder search engine optimization goals of our organization. So, not only should we worry about clarity. We also should worry about whether the headline will help get the content more visible in search.
I’m still guilty of trying to pass off the occasional clever headline. Seems I can’t help myself. Old habits die hard. ;)
I know what you mean, Andy.
I fall for the “clever” headline myself from time to time. But, this isn’t the main issue I’ve seen in the higher ed blogosphere.
When I work on the selection of blog posts for my weekly email newsletter, I see many post titles that don’t convey the main point of the post or don’t make sense when they are taken out of context.
I guess it’s easier for bloggers to focus on topics, while editors can’t stop thinking about readers ;-)
This post could not be further from the truth. Headlines really are the basis of reading information on the web. From personal experience, I know that if I read a disinteresting headline I will not read the article. It is vital in today’s fast paced technology world to have a witty and concise title. Writers need to know that if they do not have a good title, people will NOT read what they have wrote.