Give it to me in 65 characters or less.
Some people just talk too much.
Spewing out information like middle aged women at a mothers meet luncheon. It’s annoying and un-necessary.
This can also be said for information and articles on the web. Gobs and gobs of text being smashed on your screen and frustrating the hell out of your eyes; they dart and sprawl all over the page looking for the best place to begin the reading battle.
Honestly guys, must we? Must we confuse the public, our fellow blogging, fellow article reading friends? The same goes for headlines and titles. How many times a day do you receive an email and the subject is completely cut in two due the excessive amount of text the sender has decided to enlighten you with?
The world would be a much nicer place if people were more considerate to one another, yes I regard being considerate as ‘considering’ the work load and mental capacity of others when forcing information upon them. Just tell me what it is, not it’s life story.
I personally would be more inclined to read a news article with a catchy, concise and straight to the point headline than a long, drawn out and OTT one; you’ve just completely unfolded the story to me in that article Mr Journalist with your lengthy headline, thanks now I don’t have to read it.
Google doesn’t like long headlines either. Fact. Google even punishes those who live life in headline text excess. Google truncates long titles and headlines. Nice of them to cut things short for us. Since Google practically owns the internet it would make sense for us to abide by its rules? Huh?
Yahoo News seems to have adopted a similar principle, once showing approximately 120 characters in all headlines and now have chopped that right down.
Shouldn’t we put a rule in place? 65 characters maximum for headlines.
It would make things much easier. Re-tweets for instance would be bliss.
Have you ever wanted to re-tweet a solid article that you read over breakfast however the headline is too long to fit in your tweet. This is called miserable copywriting.
A study found that 77% of press releases indexed in Google News had headlines that were more than 70 characters long, and so Google truncates them.
More than 1 in 4 of all headlines wouldn’t fit in a tweet. Said study looked at 15,000 press releases, that’s a rather considerable figure, and completely outlines the poor PR copywriting we have been reduced to.
Ok, I’m going to leave you with this - 65 characters maximum for headlines & titles for search, news aggregators, social media/networks and email; let’s enforce it. Or at least use it as a guide, for now.
