The Ideal length for everything on Social Media

“How Long Should My Post Be?”

Have you ever wondered if you were ever writing too much while updating your Facebook status or Tweeting something hilarious to your followers? I have, as a writer you always think about the length of your copy. Does it make sense? Is this too much filler information? Is there a better way to say this? Should I take this word out? How long should my post be?

Yeah, it’s crazy, but as writers, we overanalyze every awkward sentence fragment, comma and period.  These are all things as a writer you have to think about. A status says a lot about you, your personality, style, and flare so when you put fingers to the keyboard you want to make sure you say something that will impact readers or simply make them see something different than they did before.

Sometimes we can get carried away when we write because we are so caught up in the moment. That’s fine, what I like to do is write down every point and witty comment and organize my thoughts later.

Usually, when I write I feel so flustered because I have so many ideas, even as I write this now I find my mind racing through all the different things I could talk about. It’s a good thing, and it motivates me to write as much as I can because sometimes when you have a great an idea, it’s gone just as fast as you thought of it.

Good news is that there is solid research that shows the value of writing, tweeting, and posting certain lengths according to nextweb.com.

How long should my post be you might ask?

• Twitter is one social media platform that actually limits what we can say when we tweet, so is there a correct tweet length? Yes there is, in fact Twitter says that 100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet.
• Everyone says Twitter is bad because it limits us, but it actually forces us to think about the way we word things, and makes us think outside the box and enables us to think of smart and unique tweets.  Also, recent studies show that the shorter the tweet the more engagement you’ll receive.
• Facebook says that forty characters is the ideal length for a Facebook status. The 40-character group was also the smallest statistical set in the study because only five percent of all posts qualified at this length. The next groups were status’ that qualified at 80 characters or fewer and they received a 66 percent higher engagement.
• The ideal length for a Google+ headline is less than 60 characters. To maximize readability and appearance of your posts on Google+, you want to make sure you keep your text to one line.
• Ever wanted to know the ideal headline length? You’d be surprised to know that the ideal length is only 6 words; of course these are very rare and extremely hard to write but, research reveals that we don’t only scan body copy, but we also scan headlines. We only tend to read the first three words of a headline and the last three words of a headline.  If you want to maximize the chances of your headline being read than keep it to 6 words.
• The ideal length for a subject line is 28 to 39 characters, but MailChimp published a blog that stated that subject lines mean absolutely nothing. What a bold statement. Their research found that there was no significant advantage to having short or long subject lines in emails. Clicks and opens were, for the most part, the same.
• It was found that the ideal length for a title tag is 55 characters. For those of you who don’t know, title tags are the bits of text that define your page on a search results page.
• For those of you trying to build a domain, the ideal length of a domain should only be 8 characters. Good domains should be short, easy to remember, easy to spell, descriptive, free of hyphens, numbers and should not contain a .com extension.

By using this information you will be able to change the way you post information on the Internet. This will enable you to receive more engagement with consumers. Now you may never ask again how long should my post be.

 

Patricia Ferreira, Raven5 Ltd, Oakville, Ontario April 2014.

 

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