This is important if you are a blogger and you use Facebook to publish.  After the Headline of your article, the next most important characters you write are the following 280.  This is the “Facebook Cutoff”.  Without getting people interested in your article in this amount of time they are not going to click on the link to see the rest of your article and hopefully peruse (read intensely) through your blog.

So, how do you do it?

Put the important information up front.  Newspapers have been doing this for a long time, you can too.  Look back at an article to see how they are doing it.

Don’t tell people something they already know.  Why do they need to read the rest of the article if everything they are seeing is something they have already read before or is something they concluded about themselves.

Now, here is the interesting part: Test to see the sentence getting cut off at 280 characters is leaving someone yearning for more. Test the length in Facebook. Have you done so well that you have put ALL the important information in the first 280 characters that readers do not feel they need to read any further to gain insight?  If so, rework the article.

Finally, do something I didn’t do in this articles headline, and ask a question.  It might generate people commenting on the article, as they have thought about their response since they read the title.