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Long or short-form content: which is best? #DigitalInsight

Author's avatar By Susanne Colwyn 22 Sep, 2014
Essential Essential topic

What length of copy is most shareable across social media?

As we all put more effort into content marketing and our competitors do as well, we want to get cut-through, to maximise the chance of sharing. So, it helps to know the length of copy which maximises shares.

We like this research from CoSchedule since it isn't based on opinion, it's based on data analysing the number of shares from social media from 1 million articles, focusing on those with more than 1,000 shares in total... It showed that 'on average, longer content gets more shares’.

Average Shares by content social media Source: OkDork.com

Of course, there will be exceptions to any rule-of-thumb based on a large data set, but this clearly shows that  content producers who create more in-depth content will be rewarded by more shares.

Their research reinforces researchers found in the NY Times from their email analysis, that longer emails for example can be more shareable.

Author's avatar

By Susanne Colwyn

Susanne is a Marketing Consultant and Trainer, with over 20 years marketing experience in the public and private sector. She's passionate about supporting companies with practical result driven marketing, to help focus companies on evaluating and driving their marketing forward. Experienced in Integrated Strategic Marketing Planning, Data Segmentation, Customer Relationship Management Systems, Customer Insight and reviewing internal systems, data and processes, to maximise conversion strategies and the customer experience. You can connect with her via her LinkedIn or follow her @Qtymarketing.

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