Ghostwriters | episode 2

 

Social Media - is word count/post length still a thing?

When you post on social, you’re competing with millions of other brands for your customers attention. There’s no such thing as too much engagement on social media...

But let's be real. Every so often when you're instagraming or Facebooking, you'll think: Should I really be writing so much?

No one's going to read a social post that's 50,000 characters long.

  1. Feel like you’re too wordy–or too brief?
  2. How much will my audience actually read?
  3. What is the ideal length that will keep them interested?
  4. Am I writing enough or am I putting my audience to sleep?
  5. What should an ideal blog post length be for LinkedIn?
  6. What is the optimum length of an eye-catching headline?
  7. Should I use up all the characters in a tweet?
  8. Are long-form social media updates better than short-form ones?

Here’s the best of what Ghostwriters found.

What's too short to every be worth reading!

Make it too short, and you risk getting overlooked

Why longer content can bore your readers

Go too long and you might reach the social media character limit. Longer posts also get cut off in a user’s feed, which forces them to expand the text if they want to read the full story.

So what’s the sweet spot for the length of a social media post?

Creativity loves constraints and simplicity is at our core.

  1. Instagram - The ideal length of Instagram post is holding between 138 and 150 characters.
  2. Facebook - Posts that contain 40-80 characters or less earn 86%-88% more engagement. The key is to keep your posts short and concise. It’s satisfying.
  3. Twitter - An organic Twitter character length is from 71 to 100 characters long.
  4. LinkedIn - Keep your posts under 140 characters for both personal and company posts.This ensures that your readers can view all of your content when scrolling through their feed. Looking at the combined averages we find that short posts had a higher number of average views per post (180.94 vs 158.93). That equates to 13.85% higher views per post compared to long posts. On the LinkedIn blog side, treat it as you would treat any other blog.
  5. Youtube - The optimal video length is three minutes and the perfect title should have 70 characters or less.

What's this shorter content trend that's going on?

Conclusion

All these principles are simple, but it will be better for you to notice them. If you will know what content should be added to each social media, you will have a massive engagement from each platform.

 

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