Headlines Matter: Using Headlines to Predict the Popularity of News Articles on Twitter and Facebook

Abstract

Social media like Facebook or Twitter have become an entry point to news for many readers. In that scenario, the headline is the most prominent — and often the only visible — part of the news article. We propose a novel task of using only headlines to predict the popularity of news articles. The prediction model is evaluated on headlines from two major broadsheet news outlets — The Guardian and New York Times. We significantly improve over several baselines, noting differences in the model performance between Facebook and Twitter.