Lessons learned: Keep your headlines simple, stupid
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The world we live in is flooded with information competing for our attention. To break through the noise, we need to know what is more likely to grab people’s attention and get them to remember what they saw. Motivated by this, a cross-institutional team from Ohio State, Michigan State, and Harvard conducted a series of studies to determine if headline simplicity made readers more likely to click-on and remember a headline (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn2555):
- Study 1: The study team partnered with The Washington Post to analyze data from 24,044 headlines. The authors investigated how clicks on a headline were affected by the headline’s simplicity – assessed from a score based on character count, use of common words, readability, and use of formal/analytical writing style.
- Study 2: Similar study to study 1, except using Upworthy data from 105,551 headlines.
- Study 3: The study team tested if clicks and phrase-recognition were affected by headline simplicity using 524 participants from Amazon Turk. To do this, the team tested headlines from The Washington Post dataset against more complicated versions of those headlines crafted by the study team.
- Study 4: Similar to study 3, except the participants were professional journalists and writers recruited from a writing webinar.
What they learned: Members of the public are more likely to click-on and remember headlines that are simple. However, professional writers aren’t any more likely to click-on or remember simple or complex headlines.
Why it matters: Professional communicators need to be aware of the differences between what they see as engaging/memorable vs. the public. Understanding how to write a good headline for your audience can make a difference in how many people are reached by your content.
➡️ Idea worth stealing: Make sure your headlines are simple: use common, short words, and as few words as possible. Also consider a narrative style of writing – which uses more pronouns them prepositions. For example, the headline “Meghan and Harry are talking to Oprah. Here’s why they shouldn’t say too much” outperformed “Are Meghan and Harry spilling royal tea to Oprah? Don’t bet on it.”
What to watch: How communicators learn to leverage new tools, like AI, to craft more engaging headlines.
