The Word Count Guide for Content Marketing Distribution Channels
Phoebe Robson, Blogger
When limiting word count to produce pristine content for your marketing strategy, word count tools are your best friend. However, knowing what word count limit produces optimal results—e.g. website traffic and engagement is a different thing altogether. As you post on different channels, the rules change. There is never one definite answer or definite word/character count limit.Here is a word count guide for various content marketing distribution channels.
BLOG POST
Longer content is better content. Or so they say.Longer content doesn’t always give you the optimal engagements. Users prefer in-depth content that thoroughly covers a topic or a subject.Having a 2500-word count blog post or even up to 5000 is still acceptable as long as you provide an exhaustive one-stop guide for a topic. Having said this, you need to dedicate time and effort to build a pristine content.It looks good from Google’s perspective.However, if you are just targeting to increase your page views, you can still write a short blog post as long as it stays within 300 blog post character limit. A 500-1000-word count blog post helps with SEO branding and it is long enough to cover a topic.With this length, you can still target keywords and still great for pleasing Google.If your goal is for engagement, you can play within 2100-2500 word count.According to Buffer, the sweet spot for a blog post that gets optimal engagement is an average read time of 7 minutes, with 300-word count per minute. This hits the readability score and is also good for SEO.If you are ranking for competitive keywords, it requires writing not less than 2500 word count with high-quality, long-form content.While you focus on your blog post’s body, you should also not forget about the title word count limit which should be around 50-60 character limit.It often has to do with the dimensions. Google can read about 600 pixels that convert to 60 character limit.META DESCRIPTIONA meta description is the one that appears in the SERP. It functions as a blurb or a preview to your blog post. It makes or breaks your content strategy as it relies on pixel count or on what character count appears in the SERP. Keeping it within 145-155 character limit produces the best results.
A status update’s ideal length is 40 character limit. This number relies on the like and comment rate that a post gets. The 40 character limit Facebook posts got 86 percent higher engagement according to a study as featured in this Buffer post.In the same post, they found that an 80-character limit or less post gained a 66 percent engagement rate.
Instagram is not purely visual content. It helps to know what viewers should look at. While this is the case, you should keep Instagram bio within 150 character limit and hashtags can be as many as 30. The ideal length of an Instagram caption is under 125 characters. But we all know, putting emojis and other descriptions for decoration helps in engagement. Hence, you need to put your most interesting caption on the first 125 character limit, since this is what viewers see on their feed.Leave hashtags and other decorative descriptions at the end.
SNAPCHAT
If you haven’t been using Snapchat in your content strategy, this is the best time that you do. Especially if your target audience is the younger generation, your market is using Snapchat with millions of daily active users. Like Instagram, Snapchat also focuses on visual content. But with Snapchat, you only have hours to show your snap. Hence, you want your viewers to focus on your images and use the caption only to support the images.It’s not ideal to create longer captions as it distracts the viewer.
Although 140 is the character limit, the sweet spot is 100-120 characters, no more than 2 hashtags; hashtags limited to 11 characters. Although hashtags give you more engagement, more hashtags make your post look spammy. A 100 character limit gets a 17% higher engagement rate and a spike in retweets.
You should limit a LinkedIn professional headline to 120 character limit and a professional summary of 2000 characters. The position title should not exceed 100 character limit and the description of 2000 characters. This converts to a 1000-word count. While a status update should be only 600 character limit, original content posted on LinkedIn can have 4,000 characters which convert to 2000 word count.Including images also produces optimal results when posting articles on LinkedIn.
YOUTUBE
Like any other visual content, YouTube needs context like who is in the video and what to expect. Staying within 1000 characters or 500-word count is the sweet spot for YouTube descriptions.Here, it’s important to front-load your most important descriptions and CTA on the first lines and leave the rest at the end.
GOOGLE+
If six-word short stories are your nightmare in English class, Google+ description would be the same. Headlines should stay within 60 characters and one line which should be 6 words approximately. While they are hard to write, they give the optimal engagement in Google+.
EMAILS
An email subject line would be within 28-39 characters. There are advantages to short or long emails. However, as they (or Shakespeare) say, brevity is the soul of wit. Writing a short and concise email respects and values the time of your recipient. But if you need to say more, don’t be afraid to write a longer one.
Conclusion
Character limits have particular goals in mind. One, character limits are used to keep your viewers from being bored. While it keeps the appearance of simplicity, it also tries to maximize reader comprehension with short word counts. Following these guidelines does not guarantee an impressive increase in website traffic or engagement. But these are data-driven numbers that saw a spike in parameters. That said, don’t be afraid to experiment and see what works, keeping track of which post performs. From there, you can always make adjustments.
Sources
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/character-count-guidehttps://kaleidico.com/word-count-for-content-marketing/https://buffer.com/library/the-ideal-length-of-everything-online-according-to-science
