Visual Contenting April 2016 | Page 32

CONTENT MARKETING Curious how long your content should be? You’re not alone. With dozens of conflicting opinions about word count flying around the web, it can be difficult to determine how much is enough on various platforms like blogs and social media. Fortunately, we have the answers. Now that you know how big social media truly is, let’s take a look at what the ideal content length for all distribution channels really is. Twitter Is Twitter really increasing its character limit from 140 to 10,000? This infographic from Express Writers shows you everything you need to know about content word count. But, best practices currently state that it’s more fruitful to keep Tweets limited to 100 characters. Here’s why: The Rise of Social Media: Why Your Content Matters • Tweets that are 100 characters or shorter enjoy 17% more engagement than longer Tweets • So-called “medium length” tweets (between 71-100 characters) are re-tweeted more often than large (101-characters or longer) or small (41-70 character) tweets • Twitter is built on brevity, and 100-character tweets are easy for users to consume Social media is booming and one of the best ways to engage with the huge numbers on each platform is to ensure that the content you share there is as user-friendly as possible. Take a look at the user numbers for some of today’s hottest platforms: • There are currently more than 2 billion active social media users in the world • Content on Facebook earns 5 billion likes each day • Twitter has more than 284 million users and the platform sees 500 million tweets daily • Google+ has more than 363 million users Online Content Lengths for All Web Platforms Visual Contenting Facebook While Facebook is often thought of a long-form content platform in comparison to Twitter, it may surprise you to know that the ideal character limit for a Facebook post is actually shorter than a tweet. Here’s what you need to know: • The ideal Facebook post is 40-characters or fewer • Facebook posts with 40-characters earn 86% more engagement than longer posts • According to Facebook best practices, the second-best length of a Facebook post is 80 characters or less. These posts receive 66% more engagement than longer posts Google+ Google+ is all about readability and accessibility of content, so it’s important to keep content easily digestible.