I came across a blog this evening I hadn’t seen before called Prevential that had a  terrific post on the  top 15 Proven Headline Templates That Pull Twitter Traffic. 

The blog’s owner pulled well-known headlines like ““How to Win Friends and Influence People” and tweaked them for use on Twitter and other social media sites.  Here’s a couple he mentioned:

“How to Win Friends and Influence People”

• Example 1: How to Win Friends and Influence People on Twitter
• Example 2: How to Attract and Influence People on Twitter

“How I Improved My Memory In One Evening”

• Example 1: How I Improved My Business In One Evening
• Example 2: How I Gained 500 Followers Overnight

I don’t advocate copying his titles verbatium but they are a good guide and can be remixed with your keywords.  You can see the rest of them here.

Of course there are other ways to get your headlines noticed on Twitter and the social media sites, you could always try to incorporate colorful headlines such as these using various “angles”. 

For example, here’s a local news angle…

Or you could  incorporate the use of statistics as your “angle”

Or just be a little mean……

And of course there is always the bump and grind approach…

LOL.. ok, so that last one may not be what you expected but — I bet you looked or were at least tempted to look.

So what’s the link take-away here?  Good content may be what motivates a person to link but a great headline is what leads them to it.