Okay let’s face it. People these days shorter attention span than goldfish!
In fact researchers surveyed 2,000 people in Canada and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms. Alas the results showed the average human attention span has dramatically fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 (around the time the mobile revolution began) to 8 seconds (see reading at the bottom of this post for details).
You know what this means? This means that whenever you post something on your facebook, twitter, or blog, we must keep the content short and concise. Furthermore, the content must be easy to must be quickly and easily!
How do we know what’s too long or short for our social media updates?
Thanks to Kevan Lee from buffer social, there’s an answer to this question:
Interesting isn’t it? These numbers were actually data-backed (read the article on optimal length for social media update for details) and based on countless numbers of research.
Although it can be argued that what’s really right for some people in terms of ideal length might not be exactly what your specific audience needs, it’s always a good idea to use data as a starting point for your own testing.
What I found particularly interesting about the above finding is the fact that optimal length for a Facebook post is actually shorter than that of Twitter (i.e. 40 characters for Facebook vs 71-100 for Twitter). Though sometimes it may difficult to keep your post really short on Facebook, since posts at this length (i.e. 40 characters per post) tend to receive higher “like” rate, comment rate, I strongly recommend you to try to keep it concise.
What do you think of these so-called “ideal lengths” for social media updates? Any alignment with your own social media experience? Let me know what you think in the comment section below!
Read the article on attention span here:
Read the article on ideal social media update length here:
https://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-length-social-media