Are you more likely to click headlines that are phrased as a question?

Posted on November 13, 2013

In the competition for readers' mouse clicks, a favoured trick is to phrase headlines as questions. This isn't an Internet innovation. As a way to grab attention, question headlines have been recommended by editors and marketeers for decades. But what is new, is the easy ability today to measure how often readers choose to click a headline. For a new paper, researchers in Norway have used Twitter to find out if question headlines really do entice more clicks.

Linda Lai and Audun Farbrot used a real science communication Twitter feed that had 6,350 followers at the time of the study. Real stories were tweeted to these followers twice, an hour apart. The first tweet used a statement headline, such as "Power corrupts". The second tweet, referring to the same story, was phrased as a question that was either self-referencing, as in "Is your boss intoxicated by power?" or non-self-referencing, as in "Are bosses intoxicated by power?"

Lai and Farbrot found that self-referencing question headlines were clicked on average 175 per cent more often than statement headlines (this advantage dropped to 150 per cent for non-self-referencing question headlines). The difference in clicks for question and statement headlines was statistically significant, but the difference between the self-referencing and non-self-referencing headlines was not.

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Source material from British Psychological Society