Why do tweets have to be so short

More engagement. Still, since replies are up it could mean there is more conversation happening on the platform — and a greater likelihood that brands could be generating more engagement.

At the previous character limit, Twitter says the most common length was 34 characters. At the current character limit, the most common Tweet length is one-character shorter at 33 characters. Twitter says when tweets could only be characters, less than 10 percent 9 percent hit the character limit. Now that the character limit is double that, only one percent of English Tweets are making use of all characters and 12 percent are longer than characters.

Five percent of English Tweets are longer than characters. To arrive at this number, Medium measured the average total seconds spent on each post and compared this to the post length. All Medium posts are marked with a time signature for how long the read should be. And there we have it: the average total seconds rises for longer posts, peaks at seven minutes, and then declines. A photo-heavy post could bring the average down closer to 1, They looked at the top 10 results on search results pages and counted the words in each article.

Their data included text in the sidebars of posts, so you can knock a few words off of the totals below. Upworthy cited factors like type of posts and audience as a couple of possible explanations for the discrepancy. If you put in the effort, so will your audience. I know, I know. Social media expert Derek Halpern found that there are a pair of very important, underlying factors that go into the width of your content:.

The ideal paragraph length, in this sense, would appear simple to the reader and allow for easy reading. Halpern believes he found the window where this happens. The problem is, to ensure maximum comprehension and the appearance of simplicity, the perfect line length ranges between 40 and 55 characters per line, or in other words, a content column that varies between pixels wide it depends on font size and choice. Forty and 55 characters per line means about 8 to 11 words. You may have noticed many sites online that have a different font for their lead paragraph than they do for the remainder of their text.

Would you believe there is psychology at play here? Consider that shorter lines appear as less work for the reader; they make it easier to focus and to jump quickly from one line to the next. Opening paragraphs with larger fonts—and therefore fewer characters per line—are like a a running start to reading a piece of content. This style gets readers hooked with an easy-to-read opening paragraph, then you can adjust the line width from there.

This was quite the authoritative statement, but MailChimp had the data to back it up. Their research found no significant advantage to short or long subject lines in emails.

Clicks and opens were largely the same. By this token, you are likely to be okay writing an email of any length and always better off being specific and helpful with the subject you write, regardless of how many words you use.

That being said, other research hints at a sweet spot: characters. Here is their analysis:. The stat is one of the few of its kind to show a demonstrative but not overwhelming difference in subject line lengths.

Litmus referenced this study in their p opular subject line infographic. If there were ever to be a recommended length for a subject based on research, this would be it. Beyond the perfect length, you can also adhere to best practices. In general, a character maximum is recommended, although MailChimp does point out that there can be exceptions :. The general rule of thumb in email marketing is to keep your subject line to 50 characters or less. Our analysis found this to generally be the rule.

The exception was for highly targeted audiences, where the reader apparently appreciated the additional information in the subject line.

Of course, you can always just learn from those who do it best and those who do it worst. Organizers of TED have found that 18 minutes is the ideal length of a presentation, and so all presenters—including Bill Gates and Bono—are required to come in under this mark. The science behind this minute mark comes from studies of attention spans. Scientists seem to agree on a range of 10 to 18 minutes for how long most people can pay attention before they check out.

The physiological reason behind this is that new information must be processed by the brain, resulting in a huge use of glucose , oxygen, and blood flow as brain neurons fire and burn energy. A long tweet, it appears, is there to be read, not skipped. Name — image — tweet very common. Tweet — engagement — name — time. This asks the question, are you putting captivating images in your tweets?

Is it time you upped your media game? Multiple participants stopped scrolling and paid attention to a tweet when they saw other people had liked or retweeted. This is especially interesting considering the accounts followed from the test account were not all followed by the participants of the test. We found that not only did the majority of participants read captions but in fact, captions under images were more likely to be read than tweets themselves, with users spending a long time on this section.

If you need some help breathing life into your social media, get in touch. Our team can help you to harness the power of social media — allowing you to reach new audiences and tap into new business. Speak to our award-winning team today. Short and sweet or bigger and better? This brought up some questions 1 Did myself and Alex simply lack an attention span? The Test The Usability Lab, as the name suggests, is a lab-facility designed to test and analyse human behaviour when using computers or mobile devices.

Our Hypothesis Twitter users do not consume character tweets in equal measure to character tweets. Experiment To have a test group of Twitter users browse Twitter as they would normally whilst we use eye tracking software to analyse: 1 Where on tweets users look the most 2 How long users spend on tweets Methodology Using 10 volunteers, we asked each one to supply their Twitter handle so that we could set up a dummy account that would feature accounts similar to their own.

They can capture very fast eye movements saccades , as well as the places where users pause to focus their attention fixations. To image or not to image? What this means We were right in our prediction about tweets with media receiving more attention than those without. What this means for marketers The results show that people have a greater online attention span than you might assume.