FrontGate Media’s blog series on The Science of Social Media: Posting analyzes the five major considerations to think about when creating a social media posting strategy as exemplified by our own experience and tips from serving clients in social media since 2007, and references from an excellent study conducted by Track Social. 

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Next up on our posting topics is the length of a post.  This is a pretty straight forward analysis, which clearly shows that short posts get higher response:

It’s clear to see that Twitter got post length correctly.  Any post with 140 characters or fewer saw much higher Response Scores.  The number of comments, however, seemed to stay steady between the various post lengths, but there was a large variance in the number of likes.  This shows that it is important to avoid wordy, round-about posts and to “get to the point with short, punchy statements.”  People don’t have time and usually aren’t interested in reading an entire paragraph update as their eyes skim the news feed.  Going back to Part 2 of our series, posting a picture with a smart message will help decrease post length and will be highly interactive.  As we all know, pictures are worth a thousand words.  Now, not every post on Facebook will be tiny, but you can expect the results on shorter posts to be generally better than longer updates.

Here’s a simple, short post we posted for Kenny Luck on New Years that got great response from his audience:

For other tips for successful post-writing, check out our previous blogs in this series:

The Science of Social Media: Posting – Overview (Part 1 of 6)

The Science of Social Media: Posting – Visual Posts (Part 2 of 6)

The Science of Social Media: Posting – Content (Part 3 of 6)

Look for Part 5 next week, in which we’ll be exploring how often to post!