headlines
Twitter headlines - que?
29/04/09 11:47 Filed in: Social
networking practice
I love this Copyblogger blog post. I love it more
than I ought to. It’s all about getting the
right headline for your Twitter post. Here it is.
It’s all about Twitter and getting a good headline. People read headlines before the read the articles that underpin them. I understand this stuff, I’ve been a journalist for 20 years.
What Brian at Copyblogger has missed, though, is that a Tweet isn’t, and doesn’t have, a headline. This is actually a problem for him because his whole post is based on the idea that people use Tweets to get others to look at their content. OK, sometimes this is true. Today alone I’ve Tweeted about the Raconteur supplement I edited which is in today’s Times and of course many readers will be coming to this blog entry through my Tweeting it or Facebooking it. But many Tweets are different. They are ends in themselves. This never, ever happens with headlines - they are always an invitation, never ever are they content in their own right, even when they end up being better than the article itself.
So yes, some of the Copyblogger stuff makes sense - be succinct, invite people into your world, write clearly. But don’t approach Twitter like headline writing. It is - or should be - a completely different thing.
It’s all about Twitter and getting a good headline. People read headlines before the read the articles that underpin them. I understand this stuff, I’ve been a journalist for 20 years.
What Brian at Copyblogger has missed, though, is that a Tweet isn’t, and doesn’t have, a headline. This is actually a problem for him because his whole post is based on the idea that people use Tweets to get others to look at their content. OK, sometimes this is true. Today alone I’ve Tweeted about the Raconteur supplement I edited which is in today’s Times and of course many readers will be coming to this blog entry through my Tweeting it or Facebooking it. But many Tweets are different. They are ends in themselves. This never, ever happens with headlines - they are always an invitation, never ever are they content in their own right, even when they end up being better than the article itself.
So yes, some of the Copyblogger stuff makes sense - be succinct, invite people into your world, write clearly. But don’t approach Twitter like headline writing. It is - or should be - a completely different thing.
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