How do your followers react to the length of social media posts? If it’s a long caption, will they read it or keep scrolling? By optimizing the length of your organic social media captions, you’ll be more likely to engage with your audience and get noticed online, ultimately converting viewers into customers. Does the ideal social media post length differ per platform? You bet – It’s typically determined by how average users use and engage on each platform! But never fear, that’s why we’re here to help keep you in the loop with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram best practices.
Ideal Facebook Length
When scrolling through Facebook, users tend to prefer a caption that is straight to the point and easy to process. This means that content that demands less work to consume and understand will receive higher engagement – which is what users want.
Research has shown that keeping Facebook captions concise pays off. Facebook captions under 80 characters could reward you with 88% more engagement compared to one that’s longer. Notably, Facebook will automatically cut off longer posts with an ellipsis ‘…’, forcing users to take an extra step to ‘see more’ of the post. Naturally, this little bit of extra work drives down engagement and users will be more likely to keep scrolling.
Sweet spot: 40-80 characters
Ideal Twitter Length
Twitter has always been known for its 140 character limit. Thankfully, in 2017, the platform doubled the character count to 280. However, this doesn’t mean that you should be tweeting to the maximum requirement. Twitter is a fast-paced social media platform where you need to be able to grab your audience’s attention in seconds.
Getting your tweets down to an ideal 71-100 character length can be a challenge, but it also forces you to be clear and concise with your message. Shorter tweets are easier to read and enable users to add their own commentary, resulting in higher engagement with your tweets.
Sweet spot: 71-100 characters
Ideal Instagram Length
Because Instagram is such a visual platform it can be rare to see long captions, especially from leading brands, because they often don’t need an explanation. For everyone else – us included – Instagram captions provide context and encourage engagement by boosting the value of a post.
Believe it or not, Instagram captions are able to be up to 2,200 characters long! But, trust us when we say that your followers do not need an essay. Instead, show off your brand’s personality in an Instagram caption between 138-150 characters.
Sweet spot: 138-150 characters
Keep in mind that social media best practice is constantly evolving. Sims Advertising’s digital experts stay on top of the latest trends and algorithms so you don’t have to. These recommended lengths of social media posts lengths can differ per brand depending on your audience’s needs. Contact us today to put your brand under the digital microscope and put a digital strategy in motion to increase your engagement online.
