How Long Should My Content Be On Social Networks?

Content

You have set up all the social-media sites you think would be beneficial to your business, yet are not seeing the returns you would like. Perhaps you are not posting enough content to grab your targeted audience’s attention or your content is too long causing your followers to become bored. Posting the ideal content length is something that perplexes marketers across many industries. The ideal length depends on numerous factors such as engagement, along with what is standard for your particular industry. However, there are a few tips to keep in mind that may help. Here are some content length guidelines to consider:

Blog Content Length: Marketers seem to struggle with blog content length the most, and for good reason. It’s frustrating to spend a great deal of time creating and perfecting a blog post and then discover days later that no one has read it.  In order to succeed in blogging, you must grab the attention of your audience and keep it. The ideal length of a blog post should take your readers about seven minutes to read from top to bottom &mdash this usually equates to between 1,400 to 1,750 words — after about seven minutes your readers tend to get bored and will move on.

Facebook Content Length: Facebook engagement is usually precipitated by images, with images receiving 120% more engagement than writing, but when you are posting text, the ideal length to generate more engagement is between 100 and 119 characters. Long posts seem to do poorly on Facebook, so unless it is necessary try to keep your posts to a minimum, and of course, add pictures! You can check out our previous post to learn how to Create Quality Content For Your Facebook Business Page.

Twitter Content Length: Twitter allows you to use only 140 characters, but limiting your tweets to 100 characters will increase your engagement. Tweets that are 72-100 characters receive the most re-tweets, so it is best to try to stay in this range. Try to avoid extremely short tweets though, as research has found that short tweets (40 characters or less) receive the least amount of engagement.

LinkedIn Content Length: LinkedIn gives you 250 characters and then will cut you off with an ellipsis. In order to be sure that the description or gist of your content is seen quickly, you should keep your title under 70 characters, and your description should fit within that 250 character limit if attaching a link. LinkedIn users are more tolerant of lead generation content than those on any other social-media platform, so as long as your content is valuable to their business they are more than likely to read it when compared to other sites, regardless of length.

Now that you’ve answered how long should my content be on social networks, see how often you should be posting.