As you market your business in the social space, one of the first things you will notice is that you are either very restricted or you have no guidelines to go by whatsoever when it comes to content creation and content publishing. It can leave you confused, especially when it comes to content length. How many characters can your tweet be? How long should a blog be? What about when you construct a Facebook post? Is there any set number of words for an individual web page?
It can be very confusing, and since the Internet changes constantly, it becomes even more difficult to follow guidelines with every social platform you market on. In the following article, we will go over the ideal length for a number of platforms where your brand should have a presence. Think of it as set of guidelines that can help you make the right decisions for all of your web presence so that you can optimize for search engines as well as keep your readers’ attention.
Twitter
We will start with the easy one: Twitter. This little, fast-paced social media platform limits you to only 140 characters in a tweet. Please note that this is 140 characters, not words. That includes punctuation, spaces, emoji’s and links. As long as you stay within that limit, you should have no problem figuring out content length. However, some research is starting to show that shorter tweets have better results.
Recently, Twitter has released a new update to its direct messaging system. Once upon a time, the 140 character limit applied here too. However, with the new update, direct messages either to individuals or groups can be up to 10,000 characters, giving businesses much more freedom to reply to messages thoroughly. Again, there is no certain length that works here, but the attention span of the average American adult is only five minutes. You have much less time with them online, so short and sweet will always be the better option.
Facebook
Interestingly, there has been plenty of research on what works with Facebook, and it is less than 40 characters. Several studies found that these shorter Facebook messages get you more likes than longer posts. While that may seem like very little content, keep in mind that your Facebook posts will often be linked to a website or an article or they may even be part of an advertisement.
If you had some really valuable information to share, then you could certainly go over this limit as needed. Having said this, make sure you are providing content that people will actually want to read. Avoid getting long-winded if you want to keep people’s attention. When you go on too long, Facebook will abbreviate your post and people will have to click on “continue reading” to see the rest. Asking anyone to do this work means you will likely lose a great deal of the readers you otherwise could have appealed to.
Blogs
This has been a highly debated topic for a very long time. Not too long ago, people aimed for shorter blog posts so that they could update more often. In fact, during that time, posts would be no more than 300 words. The problem with this is, it is hard to provide any real content and information to the reader. Additionally, short posts are getting penalized in search engines like Google with their new ranking factors.
These days, you want your blog post to be between 1,000 and 2,000 words. That’s about seven minutes of reading for the average viewer. And, studies show that this will be the ideal length to keep attention to the end of the post. When you look at headings in blog posts, these should be no more than 6 words per header.
Again, this length only matters if you are providing quality information. If your content is boring, poorly written or not helpful, then you will lose those readers midway through.
Website Pages
Your website needs to be both visually appealing and content rich. However, you don’t want just a page full of words. This is not going to capture attention. Instead, it is vital that you use pictures or dynamic content like slideshows. The writing itself should not take up nearly as much room as other aesthetic elements. With this in mind, you want to limit how much you write as well.
Ideally, each web page will be between 200 and 300 words, but this is only a rough guideline. It all depends on your topic, the type of page itself, and what you need to say. Sometimes, as little as 100 words will work just fine, and sometimes, you need as much as 500 to get the information across.
Search Engine Optimisation Details
There is more to content than just what the reader sees as well. Everything you post on your website, including blogs and web content, must be optimized for search engines, and that includes using meta-data. Meta-data is simply data about data. This includes a title, a description, and a list of keywords that relate to your website, blog post or social media pages. While the reader won’t see this information on your webpage, they will see it in search engine results (it’s the title and little blurb you see whenever you search for something in Google).
- For a meta-title tag, stick to around 55 characters.
- For the meta-description, you need to stick between 150 and 160 words.
- When it comes to meta-keywords, you can only have up to 10, so choose them carefully.
While this information may not seem that significant, it actually really important. It will be the details that search engines look at first and will have an impact on where you appear on the results page. So, make sure you make the most of this content as well.
Content reigns as king on the Internet whenever you are marketing your business. This includes on social media, your web page and in any other digital presence your business may have. However, content is only part of the equation. You need to make sure you are following the right length guidelines so that you can get the best results. Again, though, this information is just a guideline. You may have to veer from it from time to time, but staying near it will help you keep the attention of the readers and ensure your information is getting read.
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