Ideal post sizes agents need to know for content marketing

When you’re writing updates and blog posts for your business on a weekly basis it can be tricky to know if you’re hitting the ideal length and attracting as many likes, views and interactions with your audience as possible.

It’s important to remember there is no right or wrong when it comes to post sizes, but there are ‘ideal’ lengths that studies have shown work better than others for certain types of content and social media updates. Why not increase the chances of your posts being successful by following a few simple rules?

We’ve put together a quick ideal post size guide for agents so that you don’t have to second guess your word or character counts when posting updates or blog entries on behalf of your agency.

Blog posts

Headline length– 8-12 words or under 70 characters.

A study by Outbrain analyzed data from 150,000 online articles and found that titles with 8 words performed best and had a 21 per cent higher click through rate (CTR) than average. Another handy finding from this same study is that blog titles that end with a question mark have a higher CTR than those that ending with an exclamation mark or period.

If you’re trying to optimise your content for your agency’s or your personal professional blog for social sharing an easy formula to stick to for sharing headlines and blog articles out on Twitter is:

• 90 characters for the title itself,

• 25 characters for the link to the post

• and 25 characters for the image.

Before settling on a blog title we recommend checking your headline in CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer which gives you a score on overall headline quality and its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic and SEO value. Handily it also give you tips on which particular aspects of your headline that are in need of improvement.

Word count– 1,600 words give or take.

The appropriate length for your blog post really depends on a number of factors, like the topic, writing style, frequency, structure, format and audience you’re targeting.

If you’re looking for a general rule to follow, according to a study by Medium the blog posts that capture the most attention on average were the ones that take seven minutes to read. An article that takes seven minutes to read works out to be about 1,600 words.

Facebook status update- 40 characters.

A study by Jeff Bullas tells us that Facebook posts with 40 characters receive more engagement than posts with a higher character count. Jeff Bullas compared the engagement rates of retail brands on Facebook (defined as likes and comment rates) and found that the ultra-short 40 character posts had 86 per cent higher engagement than medium to long updates. So it might be time to cut down your Facebook posts and see if you notice a difference in engagement levels and organic traffic.

Tweet- 100 characters.

Studies by Buddy Media and Track Social both found that the ideal length of a tweet is 100 characters. Track Social found medium length tweets (71- 100 characters) received more retweets than shorter and longer posts. Additionally, another good reason to go with medium tweets is because they leave enough characters for the original poster to still say something meaningful and allow for the person retweeting to add more commentary.

Instagram- 2 to 3 lines.

We recommend keeping your Instagram captions to two or three lines in length as Instagram has put a cap on how much you can see from the home feed. You don’t have to worry about making your captions super short where you can read it all via the feed, but It’s worthwhile to front load important information (i.e. calls to action, property addresses or prices) and leave hashtags and mentions until the end to make the most of your impression and encourage viewers to click on ‘more’ to go through to the image and see further comments.

Hopefully this guide has helped to clarify or allay your fears of whether you’re being to wordy or brief in your professional social updates or blog posts.