Good communicators know the best
content is as succinct as possible. Digital platforms are evolving.
You no longer have to wait for the media to tell your story. New
channels of communication give content creators more control over
what they want to say, where it should be, and who they want to see
it. This week we will share data related to the character length of
successful online content.
Headlines
Headlines are perhaps the easiest places to start as the overarching message is actually the same as with print: keep it short and catchy. Taking this to its logical conclusion would suggest that the perfect headline length for an online article is six words if you want to grab people's attention and convey as much information as possible. When it came to writing headlines for SEO was always to keep to the limit of 70 characters. Efforts here are seen as particularly important due to the relevance of headlines in terms of SEO because the search engines give a lot of weight to keywords in headlines.
Articles
A quick news article needs to be long enough to give some insight into a situation, but short enough to be read in its entirety before the audience gets bored. According to research, the ideal in-depth blog post is one that takes about seven minutes to read. After this point, readers get distracted and might drift off before they've reached the crucial parts of an article. Reading time is different for everyone and the layout of an article will clearly have an effect, but equated seven minutes of reading time to around 1,600 words of content.
Social Media
Surprisingly, the ideal length for a Facebook post is even shorter than for a tweet, despite the lack of limits on character number for such posts. A study performed on a sample of 60 000 Facebook pages showed that the ideal length of a Facebook post revolved around 100 characters. What this basically shows is that an attractive image and a well written concise text can lead to great results on Facebook. Also discusses several other characteristics of effective Facebook posting strategies to increase engagement, such as asking questions, posting during certain days of the week like Wednesday and Sunday, and sharing during times when people are not at work. With tweets limited to 140 characters, at first glance it doesn't seem plausible that there could be an ‘ideal tweet length' within such a tight constraint on Twitter. A study conducted found that tweets shorter than 120 characters have a 17 per cent higher engagement rate. Google+. If you're in the mood for more detailed blurbs here is the place to do it. The same Quaintly study sampled 1000 Google+ pages and showed a high rate of engagement with posts of an approximately 160 character length. Similar to Facebook, an interesting visual content accompanied by concise sentences, good hashtags and short links will have a better chance of getting noticed.