The Optimal Length for Social Media & Web Content

[Rada Vassil]

I've found this article on the Juntae Delane blog and thought it might be interesting to you too. It summarizes the best case recommendations for the optimal length for social media and web content. 

Here, some of the recommendations:

• Twitter – Tweets shorter than 100 characters have a 17% higher engagement rate.
• Facebook – Posts with 40 characters receive 86% more engagement than posts with a higher character count.
• Google Plus – If your Google+ headline can’t be contained in one line,m your first sentence must be a gripping teaser to get people to read more.
• Paragraphs – Opening paragraphs with larger fonts and fewer characters per line make it easier for the reader to focus and jump quickly from one line to the next.
• E-Mail Subjects – Subject lines containing 28-39 characters get an open rate of 12.2% and click rate of 4% on average.
• Blog Headlines – Only the first 3 words and the last 3 words of a headline tend to be read. Rather than worrying about length, you should focus on making every word count.
• LinkedIn Posts – If you’re marketing to businesses, write a 16-25 word posts. If you’re marketing to consumers, though, a 21-25 word posts would get the most shares.
• Blog Posts – Overall, 74% of posts that are read are under 3 minutes long and 94% are under 6 minutes long.
• YouTube – The most popular videos are pretty short. After analyzing the length of the top 50 YouTube videos, the average length was 2 minutes 54 seconds.
• Podcasts – The average Podcast listener stays connected for 22 minutes on average. Studies show students zone out after 15-20 minutes of lecture time. After 20minutes attention and retention rates crash.