Research proves there is still a place for long form content
Mark Schaefer
Top Voice in Personal Branding, keynote speaker, university educator, futurist, and bestselling author of "Marketing Rebellion," "Belonging to the Brand," and "Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World."
When I was a student in journalism school, I was taught to give an article “what it’s worth,” meaning that the length of the story should be dictated by the value of the story and the appropriate attention needed to cover it well.
We seem to have lost our way with that advice today as we strive to adjust to an Internet public that seems to have a short attention span. Our news feeds are dominated by listicles, infographics, and curated summaries meant to get us in and out of a story as quickly as possible.
However, new research from Pew indicates that my old journalism school lesson still holds true. In fact, people do spend time with longer-form content, even in the challenging reading space of a smartphone screen.
Pew researchers spent months digging deeply into the details of 117 million anonymized, cellphone interactions with 74,840 articles from 30 websites in September 2015. They concluded that long form content still has a place in a short-attention span world.
The study revealed that while shorter news content is far more prevalent than long-form (and thus draws more total traffic), long form articles are accessed at nearly the same rate. Fully 76 percent of the articles studied were fewer than 1,000 words in length. But, article for article, long form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form: 1,530 complete interactions per long-form article and 1,576 per short-form.
Among the key findings:
- Across every part of the day, readers spend about twice the time with long-form news content on their cellphones as with short-form. Readers spend the most time reading late night and early in the morning.
- People spend the most time on articles referred by others and the least amount of time on content they find through social media. Long form content readers spend an average of 148 seconds with a news article when arriving there from an internal link. That falls to 132 seconds for those who visit the article directly or follow an email link, 125 when arriving from an external website, 119 from search and 111 from social media. However, social media sites drive the largest share of traffic overall – accounting for roughly 40% of cellphone visitors to both short- and long-form news.
- Facebook and Twitter readers are different. While Facebook drives more traffic, Twitter tends to bring in people who spend more time with content. For longer content, users that arrive from Facebook spend an average of 107 seconds, compared with 133 seconds when they come from Twitter. The same pattern emerges with shorter content.
- Just a small fraction of users who access a story return to it later (4 percent).
- Both long- and short-form news articles tend to have a very brief life span. Fully 89% of short-form interactions and 83% of long-form interactions take place in the first three days.
There is another aspect to long-form content overlooked by many marketers today. Buzz Sumo, The New York Times and other organizations have determined that longer content gets shared more.
I think the lesson here to re-think your strategy if you’re only dosing your customers with short-form content. If the content is worth reading, your customers will value and share in-depth articles.
Illustration courtesy Flickr CC and David MIchalczuk
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This post originally appeared on the {grow} blog May 9, 2016 and has been republished with permission.
Digital Marketing
8 年Seems many of these stats are disconnected (even if they're presented as such) and the interpretation is off. Yes, it takes longer to read longer content than it takes to read shorter. It takes longer to eat a big meal than a quick snack. The researchers point out that few return later to content but those that do spend more time on long form than short. Again, users have indicated a strong interest by carrying out a behavior few others do (revisiting content they'd previously visited) but it seems understandable that it would take longer to consume long-form than short when returning. If I have 2 books I'm very interested in reading it'll obviously take longer to read the one which is has more words. Un-attached is the stat on sharing. People may share long-form content more frequently but the research doesn't show that it means anyone is reading it more. We see marketers do this very frequently. It doesn't mean they read the articles. They could just want others to believe they're more intelligent and assume that sharing long-form content makes that appear to be true. While the stats are interesting, they don't indicate which type of content is more effective. I don't see any real evidence in the data provided by Pew that shows those using short-form should add long-form to their content strategy. That assumption requires further evidence showing not just that people spend more or less time with a length of content but the action taken by those readers afterwards in relation to the content length. Simply saying "Make more long-form content." guarantees nothing but that you'll have more long-form content.