[INFOGRAPHIC]: Social Media Post Lengths for Higher Engagement
So you took the time to come up with the perfect topic for your next social media post only to have it barely clicked on, or even looked at (let the groans and annoyance commence). It’s fun and light, which your customers will appreciate, but still informational to your business and provides an opening to make connections. How come it’s not performing well?
Think of yourself sitting at home on the couch scrolling through your personal feed. Do you ever see that one post that sort of intrigues you, and then when you click on “See more” you find what feels like an entire novel hidden underneath? How many of you see that sea of words and then decide “—oop, nevermind” and scroll right past? (I know my hand is up). It’s common, and if you’re doing it with your business, that can directly impact whether or not a potential customer wants to engage with your post or even your company at all.
That’s why I’m here to tell you that size does matter when it comes to engagement. Each social media platform has an ideal length of text to help ensure your message is seen, and users interact with your brand. Of course, using photos, videos, or other forms of visual content in addition to text can help with interaction as well. The infographic shown below demonstrates those numbers, and even gives you a visual (in the descriptions) on what those amount of characters would look like:
Now, I know what you might be thinking: “That amount of text is not a lot to work with. I can use those up so easily, and it definitely won’t let me type out all the information that I need to pass onto my customers.” And you would be right— it’s hard to incorporate a good hook, provide details, and put in some sort of call-to-action all within a short amount of characters.
However, knowing how many characters optimizes your social media posts is good knowledge for your business going forward because it will help you pause for a moment and think a little harder about how to better craft your messages for your audience. While you don’t have to follow this guideline explicitly, it’s important to make the connection that shorter, more effective text can make your posts more readable, interesting, and clickable to your users. And that’s what we all want, right?