Company Buzzsumo (do they like Sumo?) made an analysis of the most successful phrases in headlines - those that made people not only click but also "like" on facebook.
If you clicked on this post then you fell for the power of those phrases: The headline is literally the "Top 3" of them. Of course it helps to have a good picture, even if it has nothing to do with the post.
The big surprise is the winner: The phrase "will make you" is at top.
This phrase “will make you” gained more than twice the number of Facebook engagements as the second most popular headline trigram. This was a surprise. When we started out looking for top trigrams, this one wasn’t even on our list.
So why does this particular trigram or three word phrase work so well? One of the interesting things is that it is a linking phrase. It doesn’t start or end a headline, rather it makes explicit the linkage between the content and the potential impact on the reader.
Here are the tops:
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