Size does matter in our literal world. The importance of size extends to the digital world as well. The size of your social media content can have a big impact on the success of your social media strategy.
So, what’s the best length for social media content? It is better to not make the content too long. Plus, today’s readers are accessing content on the go and even while multitasking. This means chances are that they might not spend too much time on a single post. Therefore, it is best to keep the content short and to the point. The other benefit of shorter content is that it can be produced quickly.
But then, how short should your content be? Finding the perfect point between providing all the important information and holding on to the reader’s attention can be tricky. Here’s how you can decide the perfect length of your content.
Your posts can be as long as you want them to be on Facebook. In fact, 63,026 characters long. Plus, you don’t get any reduction in text if you use videos or images too.
But try to not use all those characters. When it comes to Facebook updates, the preferred length is 40 to 50 characters. Longer posts can get cut off in the feed of the user. To read the whole story, they would have to expand it. Not many people like doing so.
For ad headlines, the ideal length is 5 words. For the ad body text and description, try to keep the length at around 14 and 18 words, respectively. Just give enough info to drive people to the landing page.
Since Instagram is mostly a visual platform, many do not even know the character limit. The caption limit is 2,200 characters and hashtag limit is 30.
But try to keep the character count in the captions at 138 to 150. You want the media to remain the star of the post, while giving context using the caption. Also, try to not use more than 10 hashtags. If there are too many hashtags, people are likely to get tired and give up. Plus, there are also chances that your account may get shadow banned.
For many years, Twitter had a 140-character limit, not leaving much room for expression. But in 2017, the platform raised this to 280 characters.
Despite the increase, the ideal character count stays between 71 and 100 characters. Tweets of this length are much more likely to grab attention and engage people.
These ideal lengths are only suggestions. Your audience might respond to content that is a bit longer and shorter than this. Play around a bit and keep monitoring the results to tweak your content.
