The Perfect Post Length For Social Media and Your Blog?

In this post we will look at the perfect post length for social media and your blog.  

So what is that perfect post length?

Firstly let me just say that there isn’t ‘really any ‘ideal’ anything! And it certainly does depend on your industry, your community, audience and customer demographic. However there are some stats out there, which give us some guidelines to help us decide the perfect post length for each platform or post.

Let’s look at each network independently:

Twitter – 100 Characters

The perfect Twitter post length, is 100 characters! Apparently according to Twitters guidelines they say that Tweets with 100 or less characters enjoy 17% more engagement! – On Twitter: Keep it short, keep it sweet.

Buddy Media carried out some research that supports this claim (sort of) they found that retweets peak for tweets of 100 characters while longer tweets do better than shorter. Therefore 100 characters is certainly the ultimate tweet spot! Nothing more and nothing less.

Facebook – 40 Characters

Short and sweet seems to be preferred on Facebook too! Funnily enough even though there isn’t a character limit on Facebook, it seems that 40 characters or less seem to do best! Social Media, Superstar Jeff Bullas carried out some research on brands using facebook. He found that short posts especially posts under 40 characters received 86% more engagement!

This sort of makes sense though doesn’t it? People are in a rush; there is a lot of content on social media and especially so on Facebook. If they can read and share quickly then it’s easier for them. But if your content is really long people may not have the time or patience to read the whole thing!

Google+ - 60 Character Headline

If you wish to avoid truncated text on Google+ your headline should be less than 100 characters. However this is also some value in using long headlines in G+ as it could seem more enticing especially as click bait. I would recommended that you find the right balance and experiment a bit with both long and short headlines. Your first sentence will show in the Google+ search so try and take advantage with making this irresistibly clickable for your readers.

Instagram 11+ Hashtags

For more Instagram interaction 11+ hashtags seem to be the hotspot! And the funny thing with Instagram is that the more hashtags you use the better! So don’t be shy of the #!

Blog – 1600 words

Your blog is a little different from social media but your social media and blog should be used together to help with content marketing (or getting your blog content read as much as possible!) Medium the newspaper type content aggregation site suggest that posts with around 1600 words seem to get the most attention and the average reader gets through this content within about 7 minutes. So having a more in depth post means you’ll capture peoples attention more and get those people to stick around on your blog a bit longer!

What do you think? – Will you be experimenting with your social media and blog post lengths?