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A headline might be a reader's first – and only – contact with a brand, and many will keep skimming until they land on something that takes their interest.

If you aren't into the nitty-gritty of headlines, stop reading now. But if you want to be that content creator who writes the runaway headline, here's a snapshot of what some of the research has found.

Between 1 March and 10 May 2017, BuzzSumo analysed 100 million of the most shared article headlines on Facebook and Twitter, the platforms dominated by publisher and consumer content. Then in July, it published its analysis of 10 million B2B headlines – those shared on LinkedIn – and found that the best headline phrases, structures, numbers and lengths differed from the B2C results.

1. What works for B2C content

While previous research suggested that the first three and last three words were the important parts of a headline, the BuzzSumo research highlighted linking phrases as key for headlines targeting B2C audiences.

The three-word phrase – or trigram – that led the engagement charge (likes, shares, comments) was 'will make you'. In fact, on Facebook it had twice as many engagements as the trigram that took second place ('this is why'), followed by 'can we guess', 'only X in' and 'the reason is'.

BuzzSumo determined that the success of the 'will make you' phrase was based on it linking content to the emotional impact it will have on the reader – it sets you up to care ('will make you cry', 'will make you smarter', etc.).

It also found that headlines that provoke curiosity work well when readers are looking to learn something from an article. They are a little like the 'will make you' articles, but they tell you what you'll find out rather than what you'll feel.

The BuzzSumo research found that the top five phrases starting a B2C headline were:

1. X reasons why…
2. X things you…
3. This is what…
4. This is the…
5. This is how…

The top five phrases ending a B2C headline were:

1. …the world
2. …X years
3. …goes viral
4. …to know
5. …X days

Admittedly, the second-place holder might not rate as well in Australia, but the five top-performing first words were:

1. This…
2. Trump…
3. How…
4. 10…
5. Why…

So, what doesn't work for B2C audiences? The five worst-performing frequently used phrases were:

1. control of your
2. your own business
3. work for you
4. the introduction of
5. what's new in

Confirming earlier Outbrain research, BuzzSumo found that 12 to 18 words and 80 to 95 characters had the highest engagement on Facebook.

2. What works for B2B content

In BuzzSumo's analysis of 10 million headlines of articles shared on LinkedIn, the practical and informative nature of how-to and list posts (see #3 below) proved to be strong performers in the top five most popular three-word phrases:

1. X ways to…
2. The future of…
3. X things you…
4. How to get…
5. How to make…

There was a clear frontrunner in the top two-word phrases starting headlines – 'How to…' was shared almost three times more on average than the second-place holder. The top two-word phrases starting B2B headings were:

1. How to…
2. The X…
3. X things…
4. X ways…
5. Top X…

Note that after the 'How to…' phrase, the next four most shared phrases were all forms of list posts, which gained more than double the average shares of ‘what’ or ‘why’ posts.

Celebrity brand names also garnered high levels of engagement. It makes sense that companies influencing the business environment and forging technological and business model innovation – like Uber, Google, Apple, Facebook, Tesla and Amazon – will have strong reader appeal. For example, nib's Ambulance or Uber: Who you gonna call?generated a lot of conversation on its Facebook page due to Uber's topicality.

At seven to 12 words, the optimum headline length for LinkedIn is much shorter than for Facebook.

3. The ongoing power of the list

In July 2017, CoSchedule founder Garrett Moon published results of an analysis that began with close to one million blog headlines – which were then put through various filters. The top takeaway was that list posts or listicles (headlines that start with a number) are "huge". Moon wrote they are "the most likely type of post to be shared 1000 or even 100 times". Interestingly, he also noted that "list posts only made up 5% of the total posts actually written".

The BuzzSumo research, confirming the power of lists and the list post format, found the six most effective numbers (in descending order) in B2C content are 10, 5, 15, 7, 20 and 6. In B2B content, the most shared numbers that start post headlines are 5, 10, 3, 7, 4 and 6, with 5 and 10 performing equally well. Note that how-to posts outstripped list posts in B2B.

CoSchedule's results show that list posts that they identified by the words 'thing', 'should' and 'reasons' – '5 things you can do…', '4 reasons why you should…' – do best on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

It's possible that this is due to a combination of clear promise (‘10 steps’, etc.) and the scannable nature of the post, where you can easily work out which bits you want to read.

4. Emotion is good but beware the bait

While strong emotional headlines and those provoking curiosity may get you results, you need to rein in any urge to overstate.

In May 2017, Facebook announced it would demote “headlines that exaggerate the details of a story with sensational language” and those that aim “to make the story seem like a bigger deal than it really is.”

There may be some debate about what is and isn't clickbait, but there are two key points to consider. In the first place, the reader needs to feel encouraged to read. And in the second, they need to not be disappointed when they have finished reading.

5. Research, tailor and test

There are no hard and fast rules. You always need to research what works for your audience, your topics and your social platforms, and to test your headlines. Different audiences will require different content and will be accessing it on different platforms. For example, Outbrain works for an editorial-led audience more than a business-specific audience.

In the interests of transparency, this headline isn't the first that came to mind. It's the result of trawling through this research.

Maybe we all need to take the advice of Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs: "Spend as much time writing the headline as you do an entire blog post or social post."

Belinda Henwood, Strategy & Content

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Is content marketing an art or a science?

It’s not a new debate but an increasingly relevant one. As technology continues to improve, the C-Suite is demanding a clearer measurement into impact. Marketing and communications professionals responsible for curating content are no longer governed by ‘gut feeling’ and instead, are increasingly driven by engagement metrics to demonstrate ROI.

These professionals are well aware how their role requires a mix of art and science thinking. They both draw from the left brain and the right brain, using data and reason to guide the creativity that fuels it.

But this relationship is less rigorously applied to content marketing – an emerging discipline that straddles both marketing and communications objectives.

Marketers and communications professionals have varying levels of social media sophistication – particularly with LinkedIn, which is often a core channel for content. With LinkedIn estimating more than 130, 000 posts are made on its newsfeed every week, organisations are increasingly turning to it as a distribution channel for thought leadership.

Far fewer, however, understand how to draw insight from the platform to ensure their content connects with their target audience.

Marketers and communications practitioners will often speak to me with this challenge solely in mind. Most are able to gauge the success of content on Facebook and Instagram to some level. Plenty of tools exist which measure various social aspects of content marketing, such as ‘likes’ or ‘shares’. But real engagement isn’t buzz. Determining whether content is connecting with a target audience is a key challenge.

Content marketers are struggling to understand whether their current LinkedIn strategy is working – whether it’s reaching the right audience and whether a piece of content is being actively engaged on the platform.

Other times, they will want to target a particular demographic; millennials for example. But they don’t have the understanding of what this group is looking for when they log onto this social networking site.

In short, what content marketers want to do is debunk the myths surrounding their own activity and drill down into strategy to make their dollars work harder.

How can data help?

Data is pivotal. Armed with information, marketers and communications professionals have a window into the opinions, passions and motivations of their audience.

At Isentia we’ve seen this in our own business. The Research & Insights stream has grown by 25 per cent in the last year, as this market recognises the importance of data. I’m often told by clients that they’re just at the start of their measurement journey, but still desperately rely on data to convince the C-Suite to spend money on content marketing.

Research & Insights can be used to help inform content marketing strategy by highlighting what brand-relevant topics an organisation’s audience is engaging with. It can also help content marketers understand where their brand sits against those their competitors, by measuring their share of voice on a particular topic.

But most importantly, data can help marketing and communications practitioners build out content itself. By understanding what type of content receives the most engagement on the platform, they can tailor their content strategies and measure their success at the same time.

Data is the key to debunking the myths of what does or doesn’t work in a content marketing strategy. It gives marketers and communications professionals the opportunity to ensure they understand their audience first and foremost, in order to communicate in a way that connects.

This is where science can help inform the art in content marketing.

Asha Oberoi
Head of Insights, Australia 

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Video content represents 80% of all internet traffic in 2019

Video content continues to rise in popularity. We have explored how marketers can connect with their video audience and drive strong engagements.

Download our whitepaper to learn more.

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Why PR and comms teams need to take LLM visibility seriously — and what to do about it

The next time a journalist, investor or potential customer wants to know about your organisation, it’s now increasingly likely they won’t Google you. They'll ask an AI.

They'll type a question into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, something like "Who are the leading renewable energy companies in Australia?" or "What's the best PR agency for healthcare in Singapore?" and the AI will give them an answer. The question is whether your own organisation shows up in that answer.

The implications are significant for communications professionals, whether they’re in the agency-side working with clients or in-house managing a brand. The rules of reputation and discovery are being rewritten, and there’s a new kind of playbook that we all need to adapt to. That’s what’s going to take us forward.

The shift no one saw coming, but perhaps should have

For decades, earned media has been the backbone of credibility. A strong piece in a respected outlet signalled trust, authority and relevance. This hasn't particularly changed, but the way that coverage gets used has.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of publicly available content - news articles, company websites, industry reports, social media, expert commentary. When someone asks an AI a question, it synthesises all of that material into a single answer. If an organisation has a strong, consistent, well-sourced presence across those channels, it is more likely to show up. If it doesn't, it becomes invisible and is absent from the conversation entirely.

Gartner's latest predictions for Chief Communications Officers underline how serious this shift is. They forecast that as LLMs increasingly replace traditional search, PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027. What they say is that this is a communications challenge, one that requires PR expertise to build trust, secure quality coverage, and maintain consistent messaging across stakeholders.

Their research also predicts that by 2029, 45% of CCOs will be using narrative intelligence technologies to monitor reputation amid rising disinformation, a recognition that the old keyword-based approach to media monitoring simply can't keep up with the way stories now form, spread and multiply. 

The AI-generated content loop and why it matters

One of the less obvious risks in this new landscape is what happens when AI starts feeding on itself.

Catherine Arrow, Executive Director of the PR Knowledge Hub, raised this point during Isentia's recent Inside the AI Shift webinar. As she explained, "AI can identify and interpret some publicly available commentary. The difficulty is that we have to be careful about what it is actually reading. You can already see this in AI overviews where the system may refer to online discussion without digging deeply enough into whether the original sources are genuine, reliable or themselves AI-generated. So we end up with AI nested inside AI, nested inside AI."

That creates a real problem for anyone in communications. If the content landscape is increasingly populated by AI-generated material which is optimised to be found by algorithms rather than to inform real people, then the signals that LLMs rely on to build their answers become less trustworthy. Human judgement, original thinking and genuine expertise become harder for these systems to find, precisely because they're being drowned out by content that was designed to game them.

Catherine puts it simply, "People can become immune to this kind of content because it does not sound like the way we speak to each other, nor does it reflect the way genuine relationships are built. Then, when conflict or outrage is layered on top, the environment becomes even harder to interpret."

For PR and comms teams, it's not enough to produce more content. The right content needs to be produced, one that is original, expert-led, and well-placed in the channels and formats that LLMs are most likely to surface.

What this means in practice

So what does it actually look like to build LLM visibility into your communications strategy? It starts with the fundamentals, but applied with new intent:

• Expert commentary placed in credible publications. 
• Thought leadership that's genuinely distinctive, not a rehash of what everyone else is saying. 
• Consistent messaging across channels. 
• Media coverage that's authoritative enough for an AI system to treat it as a reliable source.

This is where the gap between media monitoring and media intelligence becomes critical. Monitoring tells you what's been said. Intelligence tells you how stories are forming, which perspectives are shaping them, and where your organisation sits within those narratives — including how AI systems are representing you.

Dr Nici Sweaney, Founder and Director of AI Her Way, made this distinction sharply during Isentia's AI as a New Stakeholder webinar. "What will set people apart, and what AI cannot replicate is the human lens. The judgment, the relationships, the institutional knowledge, the strategic read of a room. The organisations that lean into supporting their people to harness these tools, rather than just deploying the tools, will be the ones best placed.”

That's an important framing. The answer to AI disruption is to get clear on what only humans can do and then make sure the tools we’re using actually support that.

Staying credible when the noise is deafening

There's a temptation, when faced with a challenge like this, to throw more content at the problem – more posts, more articles, more releases. But Catherine Arrow points out the risks of that approach.

"Maintaining credibility and authenticity means being yourself and not allowing AI to suffocate your identity. That will become harder to do as digital twins, synthetic voices and other tools make it easier for organisations to use it as a mask. The real challenge is not so much maintaining credibility. It is about maintaining humanity, empathy, kindness and a genuine wish to connect with others beyond the AI-intermediated space.”

That advice matters just as much for organisations as it does for individuals. Brands that let AI do their thinking, generating bland, interchangeable content at scale, will find themselves blending into the noise rather than cutting through it. The brands that show up in LLM answers will be the ones with a clear, consistent, well-evidenced point of view.

Dr Nici Sweaney reinforced this from the operational side. "Ethical use is not about not using AI. It’s about using it with intention, honesty, and a clear sense of what good looks like on the other side.”
She was also direct about the risks of rushing in, "Don’t add new shiny AI projects on top of already overloaded teams. That creates resentment, not buy-in. Start by solving the problems people already have."

The cultural dimension

There's another layer to this that often gets overlooked and that’s the cultural one.

Catherine Arrow raised important concerns about how different AI systems can distort or flatten cultural context. Many of the most widely used models are shaped by US language, commercial assumptions and social norms. Chinese models operate within a different political and cultural framework. For organisations working across the Asia-Pacific region, it directly affects how the brand, messaging and the market are understood and represented by AI.

"Different AI systems may distort cultural context by privileging dominant languages, simplifying complex meanings, mistranslating concepts, omitting local histories or reproducing the worldview of their developers and training environments. They may flatten culture by making everything sound the same.”

For communicators operating across diverse markets, this means paying close attention to where content sits, who produced it, and whether the AI systems the audiences are using can actually interpret it with the nuance it deserves.

Where Isentia's platform fits with its new toolkit for AI visibility

This is precisely the challenge that Isentia's Lumina suite was built to address. Lumina is an intelligent suite of AI tools trained on the language, workflows and realities of modern public relations and communications, designed to empower, not replace, the human element of communications strategy.

Isentia's Lumina AI View feature will allow organisations to track how their brand, competitors and key topics are described by leading LLMs, with auditable claims, citations and transparency with regards to the sources. It's the difference between wondering whether AI is getting your story right and actually being able to see for yourself. These aren't generic AI features bolted onto a monitoring tool. They're intelligence systems built for the way communicators actually work.

The bottom line

The communications landscape has shifted. AI isn't just a tool the team might use, it's a stakeholder in its own right, actively shaping how an organisation is discovered, understood and evaluated.

For PR and comms professionals, the priorities are to ensure experts, commentary and evidence are placed widely enough for LLMs to find them and include them in their answers. Intelligence is imperative and required to how narratives are forming across both traditional media and AI platforms. All of this needs to be done without losing the human credibility that makes communications worth paying attention to in the first place.

As Dr Nici Sweaney put it, "The people who get the most from AI aren’t the ones who use the most tools, they’re the ones who understand their work deeply enough to know exactly where AI can add the most leverage."

That's the opportunity. The question is whether we’re set up to take it.

---

To explore how Isentia's Lumina suite can help your team navigate AI visibility, get in touch or discover Lumina.

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