Keep it Short and Sweet
Every social media site is different. Vertical-oriented images work best on Pinterest, horizontal images are better for Twitter. Facebook encourages sharing posts but on Instagram, you can only like or leave a comment. It’s important to know the specific guidelines for each site in order to maximize your efforts, but there is one bit of general social media advice I’d like to share that will serve you well on just about any online platform these days:
Keep it short and sweet.
With so much information online hurtling towards us and saturating our senses every day, it’s hardly surprising that attention spans have grown shorter and people now tend to skim instead of read. Also, the human brain can process pictures 60,000 times faster than text, making us much more likely to pause over an eye-catching image than to comb through a three-paragraph post.
Like it or lump it, shorter is better on the web these days, so when creating your content, it’s a good practice to make it as concise as possible.
(There are of course exceptions – LinkedIn’s new publishing platform encourages users to express themselves at length in article format, and some authors successfully use Facebook to share longer, literary musings with their fans. But overall – trust me – shorter is better.)
In fact, here are some specific numbers to keep in mind when writing for the web:
- Mailchimp recommends that email subject lines average 50 characters or fewer.
- One study shows that tweets between 100-115 characters are 34% more likely to get retweeted.
- Facebook posts kept to 40 characters receive 86% higher engagement (likes and comments) than longer posts.
Now before you lament at having to cut back on your brilliant status updates and subject headings, allow me to suggest that scaling back your word count can actually be fun. After all William Shakespeare himself, who knew a thing or two about great writing, said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Or to paraphrase – less is more (and usually funnier too!)

Sound advice from a smart cookie!
Personally, I treat editing my online content like a game. “How can I say these three ideas in one sentence?” “How can I shave a few more characters off this tweet?” “Is this hashtag helpful or extraneous?” Having to be concise in my copy allows me to clarify my point (and get rid of any fluff that detracts from it.)
So see what happens if you practice paring down what you want to say to its most essential. Play around with keeping it short and sweet. Experiment and throw some things out online and see how people respond. And then leave me a comment and let me know how it goes – i’d love to hear from you!
**Addendum for all you Facebookers: the 40-character Facebook status update recommendation is a good guide for businesses (individuals and companies using a Facebook Business or Author Page), but for personal use, there’s no need to scale back quite so much. People are more likely to engage with posts by their friends more than posts by businesses, regardless of length or number of characters. And sometimes you just have a lot to say – I myself occasionally use longer posts on my personal Facebook page. It might be a fun exercise, though, to mix up your personal post length and see which get more interactions – long or short? If you try this out, let me know how it goes!
Photo Credit: Mercedes Blanco
July 31, 2015 @ 2:08 pm
I accept the challenge! (I’m one of those “literary” FB posters.) Wait a minute—40 CHARACTERS? I thought you wrote “40 words”, LOL. This is going to require a real tightening of the belt, a …. Oh, there I go again!
August 8, 2015 @ 11:51 am
Michael – thanks for your comment! It inspired me to add an important addendum to my post above – that the 40-character recommendation is primarily for businesses on Facebook. Feel free to play around with various lengths on your personal page. Sometimes less is more, but sometimes more is more! Let me know if you notice a difference. 🙂
August 4, 2015 @ 7:16 pm
Thank you for the post, Leah! It does help and it also helps me to relax. The usual pressure to provide input for one’s platform on the regular basis does seem scary. But brevity does help.
And I agree with the fun factor. I recently translated a poem from German into English and it was also an exercise in brevity. I wanted to translate a sentence with two or three, but it would not be readable. Much less creative or poetic. I ended up with a shorter poem then the original, keeping the same amount of sentences.
And another fun factor. The writer Alexander McCall Smith was invited once to write a novel on Twitter. I think he has written two. So basically a tweet was a chapter. He reposted them on Facebook. I enjoyed both very much. This could be a fun exercise both for writers and social media experts. 🙂
August 8, 2015 @ 11:36 am
Thanks for your comment, Victoria! Glad it helps free some of the pressure to produce, and how neat about your poem translation. Thanks for sharing about the Alexander McCall Smith twitter novel too – what a fun way to play with social media and storytelling. Here’s a link if readers would like to check it out: http://bit.ly/1IygEdT
June 13, 2017 @ 10:39 am
Prodᥙcts with specifkc enviгonmental benefits listed are superijor tto
ones claimіng beinng greeen without anny claimed benefitѕ at all.
When the cleaneɗ jewellery is dгy, stߋre it in jewelry ƅߋx tɦat has velvet lining.
These pipes аre what allоᴡ ʏou to get water when үoս trn on the faucet, appliance, hose pipes, orr whatever you decide and have insidᥱ your home.
June 13, 2017 @ 10:51 am
Not everyone rеquires a weekly cleanup, yet there are times that yyou might need extra help than usual
in the one week timе pеriod. They slowly build inn our ϲonsciouѕnesas until it is a memory that’s
being cherisheⅾ, recalled with disddaіn or aybe forgotten. Another bigg portion off duct cleaning and maintenance is replacing the filters.
July 11, 2019 @ 2:29 pm
I got this site from my friend who informed me on the topic of this web page and
now this time I am browsing this web page and reading very informative articles here.