The 8 qualities of a great social media headline (aka being araceous)

Barack Obama’s recent re-election has once again highlighted his team’s stunning use of social media. Neat, soundbite tweets such as ‘This seat’s taken’ and ‘Four more years’ have grabbed our attention – and the media’s, too. (‘Four more years’ was the most retweeted tweet since Twitter began.)

It’s worth spending a bit of time working on your headlines and tweets. Research suggests that there is no better way of increasing the effectiveness of your digital writing than looking at what works and then using what you’ve seen. There is – sadly - no substitute for hard graft...
 
But the good news is that a strong, short headline can be used in a variety of media - on Facebook, in a blog, as a tweet - and sometimes also as a call to action within an email or webpage. So, given that you can use it more than once, spending some time making it as good as possible is well worth your while.

I was preparing a workshop about writing brief messages and wanted to see if there was something that the most successful examples of social media headlines, tweets and calls to action had in common. And I came to the conclusion that they do, they have 8 common qualities. I’ve dubbed this 'being araceous', because ‘araceous’ means ‘of the arum (lily) family’ - and is, therefore, the epitome of simple elegance, which is what we're aiming at with this sort of short, focused writing.

Here’s what araceous stands for:

•    Action-orientated
•    Relevant
•    Authentic
•    Clear
•    Explaining the benefits
•    On message
•    Urgent
•    Specific & short

Make sure your headline or tweet or call to action has these 8 qualities and the result will be more elegant and effective. And if you want to know about this in more detail, you’ll have to book the workshop!

Read more

•    http://personalweb.about.com/od/tweettips/a/Writing-Good-Tweets.htm
•    http://www.copyblogger.com/why-some-people-almost-always-write-great-post-titles/
•    http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/docs/ebooks/how_to_create_effective_ctas_april.pdf