Whether it’s a blog post, press release, or article, there are a number of reasons why headlines should be short and sweet, and in fact, be 65 characters or less. Headlines need to grab the attention of intended audiences, describe the content, and can contain keywords, but when thinking about where they will play, length is critical. A shorter headline also looks better on the page, especially if it’s limited to a single line, and forcing yourself to be as streamlined as possible often prevents your key message from being diluted.
Tweets are restricted to 140 characters and this popular social network is one of the key platforms through which you can promote your content. However, there is more to it than just making sure the headline leaves room for the article link and with 1 in 4 headlines not fitting into a tweet, it shows that not enough people are paying attention to it. One of your goals should be that the post gets retweeted and not everyone uses the automatic function; many prefer to copy and paste and write RT and the @moniker of the account they are retweeting. As an example, ‘RT @punchcomms’ plus a space before where the original tweet would start is 15 characters long, and in addition, many retweeters like to add their own comment, such as ‘interesting perspective’. Also, if a retweet is being retweeted, more characters may be needed to include a second @name.
Most of the time, a title is what becomes that web page’s page title or title tag, and when a web page is rendered on Google results pages, the title tag is displayed. Page title. If this title is longer than 70 characters it will be truncated which will result in messy ranking which may cause people to stop clicking or more importantly a shortened title may not make any sense and this it definitely won’t help you gain traffic. . The news aggregator within Google also cuts off lengthy headlines, so the same rules apply for news releases that are distributed on cable services; a massive 77% of releases are truncated when indexed in Google News.
Each platform displays email subjects slightly differently, and the length may vary depending on your account settings, for example in Microsoft Outlook. However, for exactly the reasons explained above, if you’re sending a press release to a journalist and you really want them to open the email, make sure the headline, and therefore the subject line, makes sense.
Sometimes it can be difficult to keep the title below 65 characters, so if you’re having difficulty cutting it, look at where the long title is likely to be truncated to see if it spoils the meaning or doesn’t make sense. If you find the latter, I would recommend reworking it or using a subheading which may reduce the length but still allow you to offer more information.
