The opinion of marketing experts
Heidi Cohen
Chief Marketing Officer, Actionable marketing guide
The update of BuzzSumo’s 2017 100 million headline analysis reflects the changes in the marketing landscape in the past 5 years. Most notably, it reveals three key customer behavior changes caused by the pandemic:
- Content saturation continues to overwhelm all customersTherefore, they focus on shorter headlines, 11 words, or up to 65 characters. At the very least, the front end loads the key information for your headline.
- For all customers, trust is higher than other content factors. If your audience doesn’t trust you and the platform you publish, then they won’t watch your content! Therefore, the brand is more important than ever.
- The use of social media during the pandemic replaced real-life interactions. People turn to Facebook to keep up with people they can no longer see face to face. At the same time, other people spend less time on Twitter because they get information through other channels and sources.
Based on these results, I recommend that marketers focus on core marketing basics to ensure they get the most from their long-term marketing investment.
In addition, as the world emerges from the pandemic, please continue to talk to your existing customers to determine how their needs may have changed.
You can also test new options for reaching a wider audience.
Julian Shapiro
Founder, demand curve
One of the highest signal-to-noise ratio reports on content marketing. This is the only data type that BuzzSumo can combine together.
Rand Fischkin
Founder, SparkToro
If you are a content creator, strategist, or marketer, looking at data from this research at scale is a very smart investment. Not only can it help you write a headline (although it is definitely valuable for this), it can also compare what worked in the past with what works today. Clickbait, emotional triggers, lists, conspiracy content, and quizzes have long dominated how marketers view their work on social media platforms. BuzzSumo’s research confirmed some of these, broke other myths, and shed light on the nuances that really work.
Rose Symonds
Founder, Base
What’s fascinating is that, years after BuzzFeed rocked journalism with its “click-friendly” headline, they are now adopted by the general public and even those who initially opposed this approach. The successful integration of instructional copywriting such as “you need” and “you should” is an amazing insight, and more brands should consider applying it in their headline writing. In the final analysis, this entire study demonstrates the importance of understanding human psychology and human desire not to miss information that is important to our circle.
Brian Dean
Founder, Backlink
The fascinating thing is that teaching headlines work best on Facebook. This is a huge shift from the organic heyday of Facebook, when Facebook was all about BuzzFeed-style clickbait. This data shows that you can present content to your audience on Facebook. But today’s Facebook users need to know that content will teach them something new.
Amanda Milligan
Marketing director, Fractal
I find the “instructive” headline trend very attractive because I do notice that it has become more and more popular in recent years, and I bet it’s a response to people’s growing desire to listen to and learn from experts. When the title features this language—”everything you need”, “why you should”, “this is the best”, etc.—it is inherently authoritative. The news source not only provides you with information; they say they know what is best. I encourage brands to consider the authority they have in their space and how they can use this authority to benefit readers through this type of content.
