I’ve Been Going About This Headline Thing All Wrong
Why I’m saying goodbye to my love affair with long headlines
--
I can’t explain why I love long headlines so much. I suppose it’s true, we don’t get to choose what we love.
Today I read Joseph Lam’s You Only Have 56 Characters to Nail That Headline. It made me stop and think because my headlines are often way, way beyond 56 characters. But Joseph explains that when you create long headlines, Medium cuts them off when displaying recommended stories.
Doing my own bit of research, I found that on my desktop, Medium’s home page seems to cut headlines off around 90 characters. But on my mobile app, it was less.
On my iOs app, it varied between 45 and 51 before those three dots showed up and cut the author’s headline off. Even less than the 56 that Joseph suggests.
This means my headlines don’t make sense
Most readers are on their phones these days. So most of my headlines are getting cut off midway on the mobile app.
I don’t know exactly when I got the idea that I should write long headlines. I may have read too much Buzzfeed at night as my guilty pleasure and it seeped into my subconsious. On Buzzfeed, the headlines can be so long and descriptive that you don’t even need to read the article. Which is just what I love at the end of the day when my brain has stopped working.
I also started using the Sharethrough Headline Analyzer for a little extra help in creating engaging headlines. I struggle so much with headlines, I thought I needed an assist.
It’s a free website that rewards long headlines with better scores. Their advice is, “Try writing your headline as a complete sentence to deliver a more valuable impression. Business Insider does this well.”
This might work well for some publications like Business Insider or Buzzfeed. But if Medium is cutting off headlines around the 50 character mark on their mobile app, this can’t be the best advice for this platform.
What if you want your article to do well on a Google search?
According to CoSchedule, Google only displays the first 50 to 60 characters of your title. Similar to Medium, you want to keep your headlines short for Google.
How about social media?
If you’re trying to get traction on social media, CoSchedule recommends longer headlines ranging from 103 characters (Twitter) to the longest at 215 characters (Pinterest.)
Write a headline that works well for the platform you’re on
I’m writing this article on Medium. If I want my headline to show up well on the mobile app, I’ve got to keep it up under 56 characters, maybe even less.
The length of the headline matters. Here on Medium, if you want your headline to look good and make sense for mobile readers, you’ve got to fit your meaning into a short amount of characters.
Even though I still adore long headlines, I’m swearing off of them starting today for my Medium stories.
For the record, my headline for this article is 51 characters, and I really hope that means it’s not cut off on the mobile app. Feel free to let me know if it is. (If so I’ll have to edit it immediately because that would be pretty embarrassing considering the whole point of this story.)
Don’t have a Medium membership? Click here if you’d like to receive unlimited access to more of my writing and everything else on Medium. Note: this is an affiliate link, and I will receive a portion of your membership fees.
