Here’s the ideal content length for each social network (you’re not going to like the Facebook data).
We analyzed 2,384,083 pieces of content to figure out how long your content should be…
Instagram
Reels should be 11 to 17 seconds long if their focus is entertainment. 38 to 51 seconds long if educational.
Carousels should be 7 to 10 slides long, but you have to use a hook on slide 1 AND slide 2 for it to work well.
LinkedIn
Short-form videos should be 40 to 46 seconds long.
Long-from should be 3 to 4 minutes long.
Text should be 20 to 38 words long if motivational. And 291 words long on average if educational.
X
Text should be 14 to 21 words long if motivational.
9 to 35 words if entertaining.
173 words long on average if educational.
TikTok
Videos should be 18 to 31 seconds long if entertaining.
And 42 to 54 seconds long if educational.
YouTube
Shorts should be 28 to 33 seconds long if entertaining.
And 41 to 57 seconds long if educational.
Long-form videos performed the best if they were on average 7 minutes and 9 seconds long.
Facebook
In most cases the reach sucked no matter what the length of the content was… :/
It sucks but it is what it is.
Use the above data as a guide, and don’t add fluff to your content to stretch it out. It will crush your reach.
And don’t cut your content to make it shorter if your content is amazing.
The data above should be a guide. Being off a few seconds or words isn’t a big deal.
Doesn’t this emphasize the need to do grassroots marketing off of social media and all the other outlets of the internet? Once upon a time when Google was the only player in town before social media became popular is was THE place to be, but now that is not the case. The internet feels more splintered than ever before.
Marketers shouldn’t care if Google displays 10 blue links per page.
When I started off in the marketing world, search engines displayed 10 links per page.
And the click rates were through the roof.
Fast forward to today and the zero-click searches have been increasing… it’s now at 65% according to Search Engine Land.
But here is the funny thing… search engines don’t always display 10 blue links per page… it’s been this way for a while.
And they’ve shifted from only linking out to websites to providing answers directly on the search results page and even showcasing videos... which results in fewer clicks to websites.
According to Google’s Danny Sullivan, “Google has driven more traffic to websites each year since its inception”.
And the data matches up when we looked at 35,599 sites over the last 4 years. The average site increased its SEO traffic by 9.83%.
Sure, it may take forever to find the blue links in some results, but it is that way for a reason.
For example, if you Google “Tom Cruise”, above the fold you see images and bio info on the actor. Below that you see movies he's in.
Google isn’t doing this to piss off websites, they are doing this because it is what users prefer.
Do you think they would highlight a person’s social profile or bio if searchers didn’t care for that info?
Whether Google shows 10 blue links or 3… they are optimizing for what searchers want.
Yes, that can affect how much traffic you get to your site, especially if AI helps answer many questions... which is 680 million searches a day.
To give you context that is roughly 8% of all Google searches as the search engine gets roughly 8.5 billion searches a day.
And the answers AI gives are off in many cases. This isn't an easy thing to fix as new misinformation pops up every day and a lot of the misinformation has strong signals like engagement.
But for those searches that are transactional, the ones marketers make money from, there will be many blue links or options for a while.
AI can’t predict what you want to buy and when.
If you think AI is that good at predicting what people want before they even know it, just think about how good you are at predicting what your spouse, sibling, or parents want… it’s tough.