Flip through the headlines of your favorite social bookmarking website. Be it Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, or wherever, I think you’ll notice one common strain. The stories with the most attention have attention-grabbing headlines.
It’s been a newspaper principle for a long time. If you want readers to read your stories then you should write headlines that grab their attention. Then we all went online. It didn’t change. You want people to read? Reach out and grab them.
That principle is as true for social marketing at it ever was for anything else. Headlines – good headlines – make people read. They get the click. And that’s the first step to earning trust. You may write a dynamite article or blog post, but if no one reads it because you failed to get their attention with the headline then all the brilliance in the world won’t matter. Headlines. That’s where it’s at. And don’t you forget it.
