The quiz is fast becoming a staple in the content marketing world. Their interactive nature and fun-loving side have taken the internet by storm, leading to thousands of quizzes being created driving millions of visits in the last few months. It’s high time for your strategy to involve quizzes, but tread carefully, because a bad quiz is worse than no quiz at all. Buzzfeed has done an amazing job of building quizzes that are not only amazing fun, but also highly share-able. That’s why we have dissected every aspect how to create a Buzzfeed quiz to share with you here, check it out.
You need a snazzy title: 80% of people use title to determine if they want to click on an article. If you’re writing quiz titles as an afterthought that means you could potentially lose out on 80% of your audience! For a little inspiration on how some of the greatest headline writers of our time (think Gawker, NYT, Time) come up with their ideas, check out this blog post roundup.
To get started now, here are a few types of headlines that work well every time.
The “Actually” headline. For example “How American are You Actually?” this title adds intrigue to the typical question-based quiz
The celebrity comparison headline. For example “Which Gilmore Girl Would be Your Best Friend.” The underlying quiz is actually a personality type assessment, but adding celebrities makes it so much more fun.
The rating quiz. For example “How Much do You Really Know About Jurassic Park?” This one works well for trivia quizzes and helps turn a simple questionnaire into something more interesting.
You have to write in a fun way: Quizzes aren’t for hardcore learning and shouldn’t be. Use your own writing style to craft your quiz questions. Buzzfeed has done an excellent job of being snarky in all of their quizzes, and it’s working for them.
A word to the wise, don’t stray too far outside of your normal writing style. If you have built rapport with your readers, don’t squander it by writing an edgy quiz. The goal with being fun is to make people forget that quizzes have historically been used for school and testing purposes and make them remember that your quiz is really fun.
To learn more about Buzzfeed’s actual rules for creating content on the web, they’ve compiled an enormous style guidecomplete with every single little detail about how they craft content.
You must use (good) images: The quizzes from the chart below all have one thing in common (apart from getting absurd amounts of page views). Each and every one of the quizzes on that chart use images, with the average number of images used being ten. Images are powerful and can draw out strong emotions, which will draw viewers into your quiz and keep them engaged.
However, not just any image will do. Poor quality or off-topic images can hurt the perception of your quiz and decrease its value. To help out, there are a few free stock image sites with excellent shots located here. For general guidelines on selecting images for your quiz, here are a few tips.
Faces matter, we ran a study and found that quizzes with one face in particular vastly outperform no faces or more than one face.
Quality matters, having grainy images that are taken with an iphone immediately shifts the perception of quality associated with your quiz
Don’t use stock photos! They are worse than no photo at all.
You must create share-able results: Buzzfeed’s managing editor has this to say about creating quiz results.
“The quiz gives someone something that they can relate to well enough that they can share it with others,”
The keyword in the quote is relate. Writing quiz results that hit home and connect with viewers is no easy task, and you’ve got to be convincing while you do it or the results will come off as fake. Here are some best practices on writing quiz results.
Be generally specific: For every quiz result, appeal to a wide enough audience to account for all the possible people who might get the result, and then speak directly to that audience. For example, if you know that college students are likely to get one of your results, mention classes and a lack of sleep in the text. Writing in this style will be believable to everyone who gets it, but generic enough to reach a wide group of people.
Be overwhelmingly positive: One thing that every single Buzzfeed quiz result has in common is that they are all very positive and ego boosting. A sure-fire way to increase social shares is to tell people how great they are.
You must write to a friend: To be persuasive with your results, you can’t afford to come off cold and generic. For each quiz, pick a friend or person you know who would enjoy the quiz and write to them.
This will help keep the messages consistent and personal, while staying fun. Quizzes ask for a lot of personal information and it helps ease the process when you speak like you would to a buddy.
You must keep it short: Your audience struggles to stay focused for more than 60 seconds, which is roughly the amount of time it takes to answer eight quiz questions. The best quizzes are between six and twelve questions.
The reason we don’t stay focused for very long is because the average internet user constantly juggles three different connected devices at a time and is splitting time between screens. If you want to stay in the game, don’t hit people with a fifty question quiz.
Quizzes are massive and they aren’t going anywhere. That’s why it’s high time you get involved. Just follow the simple steps above and you’ll have an amazing quiz that people can’t help but share with their friends!