There are several benefits in putting a blog headline on a diet. Here are my thoughts, and the comments see discussion already... especially hot for Triberr people and bloggers who get their stuff shared a lot...
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Trim Post Titles for Reach
Posted by OsakaSaul on October 26, 2011 in English | 2 Comments
I syndicate this blog with Triberr.com, where our articles go out to fellow bloggers’ Twitter accounts – and perhaps soon, to Facebook and/or StumbleUpon as well.
The below, my response in a Triberr Tribal Council, or private forum, was to the “Chief,” or creator and manager of a small group or “Tribe” of bloggers. She noted how I often edit fellow bloggers’ post titles. She was kind enough to note this is a positive light – and while I wish other would put their article titles on a strict character-counting diet, I am concerned that my blogging peers my take offense that I will only tweet their blog when the title has been made more succint. My explanation (also in one of my tribe’s Tribal Council) for doing so follows:
I’d like to share a few ideas in hopes that others optimize blog article titles
1. We send our blogs here and there, but bother to dig deep into what is boosting our Klout, tampering down our Alexa rank (I went from 1.8 Million to under 300K in three months due to Triberr), and drawing monster page views and also real interaction on our blogs, and I believe we will agree that the Triberr tweets and our relationships forged within the Triberr community – these are doing the bulk of the work. As such, let’s optimize blog post titles for Twitter – and Triberr. Fair enough?
You get a mention at the end of the Triberr tweet. Same deal when someone tweets from your blog (unless you have not thought to swap your “AddThis” comment plugin for Disqus, LiveFyre or Commentluv). Thus, we waste precious characters when including blog name or our own name, our tweetchat program, etc. inside the tweet. That might be a thing to not do, thus.
2. Why is brevity so important? Please go, in Triberr, from Home to My Stream, click a pie chart to the right of any of your posts that appear under My Stream. We see how many page views each member is driving (or, if they declined to even send our blog tweet…) If you watch your mentions in Twitter, you’ll see that when one of the more influential members of a tribe tweets your blog, one or two people you don’t know will retweet it = more exposure for you (your Twitter handle gets one more mention – this feeds Klout and also leads to people-networking opportunities) and also more exposure for your blog.
Want retweets of the retweets you get?
Well, then after taking a shot at SEO, kindly leave enough character space for that to happen.
With blog article titles, for us in the thick of it with Triberr, now more than ever – less is more.
Example:
Someone in one of my Tribes sent this through Triberr: “What Pokemon Can Teach You About Social Media”
I trimmed this down to: “Pokemon, on Social Media”
This is sufficient and saving 22 characters optimizes for at least one, perhaps two retweets deep. Retwets on our retweets. Sure, a concise post title only provides the potential for this – no guarantee. Alas, it might not happen.
Lengthly post titles ensure that it retweet will be limited, however.
Also, since many Triberr members and within Twitter, your supporters (who would retweet you – if you left room for this) cannot be bothered spending their time to correct what they see as your SEO mistakes – they may simply be declining to tweet some of your posts for no reason other than you were inconsiderate in laying on thick too many self-serving terms.
Worthwhile, don’t you think?
At the risk of offending the author on his choice of words, as I see it:
Triberr created the option to change the post title, and it does not affect the guy’s blog, but only the tweet coming from my Twitter account. Fair, thus? What do fellow bloggers think of title edits?
Brevity in article titles will, as I explained above, send our tweets further, and garner us more page views, grow our blog following, and improve our Twitter standings.
I do wish people would do more of the trimming themselves – starting with their own blogs.
As I noted above, while you syndicate in other ways, in all fairness, since Triberr is probably doing a lot of the promotion for you, isn’t it prudent – and kind to your Tribespeople who want retweets as well – that we make Triberr optimization a priority?
A final note on article title trimming: what does a hashtag get you – other than emphasis and potentially being picked up by aggregators like paper.li? Terms are terms, and in Twitter Advanced Search, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, etc., the results are identical – with or without the hashtag (#). Why tag something in the blog post title, thus?
