Creating Effective Twitter & Facebook Headlines

Finding the right headline for your social media updates is one of the most important details you should pay attention to. Just like the headlines on your blog posts, your social media headlines will also determine whether your posts/tweets gets clicked, liked, shared, retweeted or ignored.

Testing it on Twitter

You wouldn't really know what your audience like and what works best for you if you don’t test. Here’s an A/B testing activity you can perform yourself:

• Find an article that you think your audience will find interesting
• Prepare two different headlines for that article
• Tweet both of the headlines at least one hour apart. Say the first one at 9am and the second one at 10am. Or you can have them tweeted in the afternoon, 12pm for the first headline, 1pm for the second one.
• Determine which gets the most engagement

Other factors

Of course, there are a lot more factors that go in play here – the times the tweets were sent and the number of followers you currently have. If you don’t have enough followers yet, the result of your A/B testing wouldn’t have that much impact. 

In this case, you can turn to published researched data on what types of tweets usually get more reaction from followers.

What the research says

Twitter has done their own research here and here as to what types of tweets get the most clicks and retweets. Here are the top 3 ones:

• When asking people to download
  
  The Walgreens Mobile App allows you to print photos directly from your phone to any Walgreens. Click here to download! ow.ly/dkyPq
  
  
• When asking for a retweet
  
  Retweet this for bonus entry into our #Cadbury2013 draw and a chance to win @ParalympicsGB Opening Ceremony tickets! competitions.cadbury.co.uk/en/enter/terms..
  
  
• The 20 top most retweetable words

Testing it on Facebook

The underlying elements to an effective Facebook post are no different than Twitter’s tweets.  And again, the first thing that you should do is to test, test and test.

Here are two examples of two FB posts that were sent out on a weekday, at the same time, but on two different days. 

Clearly, image one works far better than image two which leads testers to this conclusion: Posting pictures on Facebook works better if the pictures are self-expalanatory.

What the research says

The general consensus is this: Any post with pictures work better than plain-text posts. Check out this infographics for a more detailed illustration.

Other factors

Again, just like with any social media update, the time of the post/tweet will have a huge impact on the performance of tweets and posts. 

Over to you..

How about you? Have you tried testing your social media updates to determine which types of posts or tweets are more effective? You can share your thoughts and ideas by leaving a comment below.