How to Write Emotional Headlines to Get More Shares - CoSchedule

How to Write Emotional Headlines to Get More Shares Here at , we recently hit over 10 million headlines entered into our Headline Analyzer tool. Thats a lot of headlines. With this massive resource, we began wondering what, exactly, made a highly-shared headline so shareable. Could we find a way to predict whether or not a headline would be well-shared? You may be surprised to hear that we found just such a thing. When we combined our massive database of headlines with our social sharing analytics  and top content reports, we were able to get a unique view of the answer to this question.  It all comes down to something called the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score. This is the result of a simple test used to provide an actual rating that can be used to judge how well our headline will be received by others. How to Write Emotional Headlines That Get More SharesWrite More Emotional Headlines with This Free Power Words Tear Sheet So, how should you go about writing more emotional headlines? Start by understanding what constitutes as emotional. Copywriter Karl Stepp offers a great list of highly emotional words that he calls power words for emotional selling. As a handy guide,   I have converted them to this handy tear-sheet that you can download right here. Then, Test Your Headlines With 's  Free Headline Analyzer Our free Headline Analyzer  will help you: Use headline types that get the most traction for social shares, traffic, and search engine ranking. Make sure you have the right word balance to write readable headlines that command attention. See the best  word and character length for search engines like Google and email subject lines, while also seeing  how your readers will scan your headlines. Start by visiting the Headline Analyzer page and entering your headline: As you scroll down through your analysis, you'll see previous headlines you wrote for comparison purposes: The next portion will show you your headline score and the different word types in your headline influencing that score. Here at , we always aim for a 70 or higher: Scrolling over your results reveals a tip on how to better incorporate each word type into your headline: Continue to play with headline combinations until you find one that works best. It's free and you can use it as much as you'd like. How Do We Know Emotional Headlines Drive More Shares? We went through a bunch of the headlines in the system and calculated their EMV score. The results were stunning. Posts with a higher emotional value got more shares. Period. What we found was that on average, posts with a higher EMV were shared more often than posts with a lower EMV score. Posts with a high number of shares frequently reached an EMV Score of 30 or 40, several points higher than posts with fewer shares. The results are pretty cool, but how does this score even work? Recommended Reading: Why People Share: The Psychology of Social Sharing How Can The Emotional Value Of A Headline Be Calculated? Emotional marketing value dates back to the 1960s and 1970s when government research scholar Dr. Hakim Chishti was studying the roots of several languages including Persian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Urdu. As it goes, his research found that there are basic underlying harmonics in language that are always interpreted with the same "emotional" reactions. Where dictionary-based meanings can be mistaken, the sound tones themselves are always interpreted the same way in our emotional response. This means that emotional language creates a very predictable response, something that can be very advantageous to marketers. Emotional language creates a very predictable response, something that can be very advantageous in...The Emotional Marketing Value is a score that looks to asses how a group of words follows these emotional harmonics, and how likely they are to elicit an emotional response from a reader. The Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer   is a tool based on the research that is made freely available by the Advanced Marketing Institute. Using it can easily provide you with such a score. Can this tool predict shares? Maybe. The  Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer  is easy to use. Simply copy and paste your headline into the box and it will give you a calculated score of your headline’s EMV Score. Here is the result for the headline of this post: The tool provide a more complete explanation of the score: This score indicates that your headline has a total of 44.44% Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) Words. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words. And for comparison, most professional copywriters' headlines will have 30%-40% EMV Words in their headlines, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50%-75% EMV words in headlines. A perfect score would be 100%, but that is rare unless your headline is less than five words. Scores are also classified by three emotional types – intellectual, empathetic, and spiritual. The institute provides a few details on what each of these emotional types include. As an example, the emotional classification for this post was intellectual – a perfect fit for , as we are looking to promote a product that requires reasoning and/or careful evaluation. After we saw what EMV can  do, we thought  it would be  helpful to build a new headline analyzer. This free tool combines EMV with several other elements we've found drive shares, traffic, and SEO results. Recommended Reading: How to Write Headlines That Drive Traffic, Shares, and Search Results Positive/Happy Emotions Do A Better Job Encouraging Shares Here's what our top 20 most shared blog posts look like based on emotional sentiment: Ten are positive Nine are neutral Just one is negative This is a small data set, but it appears the anticipation of benefits drives more shares. Anticipation is the feeling that we get whenever we find something (like a blog post) that sparks our curiosity. We immediately begin to anticipate the contents of that post and wonder what we might find on the other side. When it comes to anticipation, our emotions will play a big role in how we finally respond to our own curiosity. Anticipating positive (or happy) events sustains the output of dopamine  into the brain’s chemical pathways, and as renowned marketer Neil Patel says  "scientific experiments show that most people anticipate future positive events, as opposed to future negative events. In the absence of anxious/depressive psychological disorders, people automatically anticipate happiness more than they do sadness." Scientific experiments show that most people anticipate future positive events, as opposed to future negative events. – Neil Patel So, this all begins to add up. Not only do emotions cause us to share, but positive emotions seem to add an additional boost. If we look back to the  three emotional types – intellectual, empathetic, and spiritual – we can easily see a distinct trend towards positive emotions and happiness. In short, popular headlines don't only trigger our emotions, but they help us imagine a positive outcome. They help us imagine a better life.