It’s surprising how once we start writing a blog post or a Facebook post and we lose the track of the word limit. Did it ever occur to you that content length can lead directly to your website traffic? At one point or another, you must have felt overwhelmed with the questions about the credibility of the work you do that can be either blog or social media management.
Several questions would have daunted your mind with anxiety, like:
- What is the ideal blog post length?
- Is it mandatory to use all characters while tweeting on Twitter?
- What is the optimal length of an effective headline?
- Does my reader read my entire post?
- Am I engaging the audience or making them switch to another?
- Should I write short snippets on social media or go for long-forms?
- Does the audience watch the entire video on YouTube or just skip to the end?
You can heave a sigh of relief. With so many flooding your mind, productivity narrows down to zero. However, the ideal content length does make the difference until the ball is in the content’s court. Engaging, conversational, and effective content still rules the content marketing strategies.
“Content isn’t the king, it’s the kingdom.” – Lee Odden
Posting the content at certain lengths can prove as an advantage to your content thus helping in the boost of your brand image and value. With such chaos and clutter of words around, it’s merely impossible to rely only on our instincts and experiences to chalk out the above questions. A good research based on trivial facts and figures of the current trends in the industry can prove to be fruitful for the long term to your content marketing strategies. Adhering to the ideal word limitations won’t cause any hindrance to your creativity. It will only enhance your online content, increase your visibility, and drive heavy traffic towards your content.
A Quick Tip: Every piece of content you write should only be as long as it takes to convey the entire message, and no longer. A minimum attention span would result in loss of information due to boredom or negligence.
Let’s dive deep into this blog and understand the ideal length for every online content?
For Social Media
A little harder to visualize but Facebook’s status length has gone from a whopping 420 characters to 63,206 length limit. To post amongst thousands of other brands competing for the audience’s attention is not an easy task.
Brands go unwavering heights to attain audience’s attention and stand out of the crowd to prove their worth over their peers. With short and compelling Facebook post you can grab the audience in your trance and later turn them into loyal customers. Keep it clear, concise, and clutter-free as Facebook’s news feed is already heavily loaded.
The ideal content length of a Facebook Post is 40 characters.
In the fourth quarter of 2017, the microblogging service went to an average 330 million users. The famous micro-blogging website Twitter sees millions of tweets daily and to try tweeting in this huge abyss can be pretty daunting.
You get to have your tweets ultra-specifically noted down which can create some impact on the audience. Try Twitter’s Analytics to check the number of characters in your tweet. You need to get noticed in seconds after posting as its feed changes faster than of Facebook’s.
The ideal length of a Tweet is 71 – 100 characters.
Google Plus
On Google+, you receive highly engaged audience which increases your course of action towards making and drafting superfluous posts. Keeping the Google+ text within one line can enhance the overall look and readability of your posts.
The ideal content length of a Google+ Post is 60 characters.
With exquisite features and excellent layouts available on Instagram, it is a famous must-have application these days for sharing photos and videos. What about the character limit on Instagram? Is the text content even important on Instagram? Instagram’s main focus is on visuals rather than text-based content. However, captions help to engage, converse, and provide value for the brands. With only first three lines visible in the news feed of your consumer, make sure you keep the extra information for the later part. Follow the KISS rule – Keep it Simple and Sweet.
The ideal content length of Instagram is 125 to 150 characters.
The platform for all the professionals, LinkedIn is one of the oldest and eldest of all social networking platforms. This platform is simple with a headline of an article and link to that article. The LinkedIn posts highly depend on who you’re targeting, businesses or consumers?
The optimal length of a LinkedIn post is 25 words.
For Streaming Media
TED Talk/Presentations
For those who have given presentations or seminars might have this notion – “How long should my presentation be to make it effective?” The very familiarity with the TED Talks can give a fair idea of how presentations are and the way they are delivered. The average time given to a speaker is of 18 minutes as people cannot focus on that time span.
The ideal duration of Presentations/TED Talk should be of 18 minutes.
Podcasts
The most versatile and convenient platform for delivering content – Podcasts doesn’t have any restriction on time or content. Creating short and effective Podcasts without distracting the audience, as they say, the average podcast listener stays connected for a span of 22 minutes, is tough. Focus on your main key area of the podcast and tune in accordingly.
The ideal duration of a Podcast is 22 minutes.
YouTube/ Tutorials/ Explainers
The main reason why Tutorials are viewed is to get the gist of the thing to be learned. Informational videos need to be crisp and succinct in order to be viewed by the target audience. Time is precious, so utilize it to gain fruitful results. With chunks of online content, be specific to get noticed.
The ideal length of a Tutorial should be 3 minutes.
For SEO
Blog Post
You often navigate to other blog posts if the one you’re reading is a bit long and the tonality is not conversational. Use of shorter sentences and impactful data can help you gain visitors to your website through your content writing. According to a study, longer content is ideal to be read by the search engines on the basis of quality and topic of the page. However, there is no particular size to a blog post but writing effective ones will always get noticed.
The ideal content length of Blog Posts is 1500 words.
Headlines
Headlines attract and allow the visitors to read the blog post. To get ranked amongst several online content competitors can be difficult. A headline expert says that a typical reader can only absorb first three words by reading the headline. This increases the need to make your headlines stand out of the box.
The ideal length of a headline is 6 words.
Title Tag
Optimize your title tag with keywords which are relevant to your topic as it helps the search engine in ranking but also catches some eyes to generate click-through useful for content marketing. Use of target key phrase and making it short can increase your chances of getting found.
The ideal length of the title tag is 55 characters.
Meta Description
Meta Description, an HTML attribute also called as snippet can be roughly around two lines which explain the content writing of a given webpage. Though, according to some sources, many snippets cross the bar of 300 characters which can be experimented as well. But, to be on the safer side, let’s keep in mind what the optimal length should be.
The ideal length of Meta description is 160 characters.
Domain Name
A short domain name can help people memorize and remember it. Great domains are short with .com extension.
The ideal length of a domain is 8 characters.
Content Length Summary
To sum it up in a brief context according to the infographic from Buffer:
The Ideal Character Count:
For Tweets: 71-100 characters
For Facebook posts: 40-80 characters
For Google Posts: 60 characters
For Paragraphs: 40-55 characters
For URL Domains: 8 characters
For Hashtags: 6 characters
For Subject Lines: 28-39 characters
For Title Tags: 55 characters
The Ideal Word Count:
For Blog Headlines: 6 words
For LinkedIn Posts: 25 words
For Blog Posts: 1,600 words
The Ideal Number of Minutes:
For Youtube: 3 minutes
For Podcasts: 22 minutes
For TED Talk: 18 minutes
For Slideshare: 6 minutes
Conclusion
Content writing in generic terms is writing content which appeals to the audience. Hopefully, these insights would help you make your identity stronger and your brand reach more people. This could just be your beginning towards attaining your content marketing goals.
Let us know which strategies turned the table? How did you manage your online content?
We’d like to hear from you!
Want to read the latest posts on social media? Then follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn!
