Goldfish Have a Longer Attention….Where Are You Going? Come Back!

February 10, 2015

Cheat Sheet for Effective Posts/Tweets/Blogs/Etc.

Why do we need to worry about how long updates are?

The average attention span for people is now 8 seconds – 1 second less than goldfish. Since 2000 our attention span has dropped a total of 12 seconds, according to National Center for Biotechnology Information. Since 1998 our attention span has dropped over 11 minutes – ELEVEN MINUTES!

The reason for this is largely due to “external stimulation,” all of the content produced and marketed over the various Social Sites as well as emails, texts, etc. (SAP) Today the average person is inundated with information.

We receive 5 times more information daily than we did in 1986. (Martin Hilbert)
The average person is exposed to the equivalent of 174 newspapers a day. (Telegraph UK)
There are about 29,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces of information floating around the world – this equals 315 times the number of grains of sand on Earth. (Martin Hilbert)

Based on the volume of information we have coming at us on a daily basis it is no wonder we have a lower attention span than a goldfish.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information studied internet browsing statistics. Using 59,573 page views they found that:

17% of page views last less than 4 seconds.
4% of page views last more than 10 minutes.
49% of web pages with 111 words or less were read.
The average length of a watched internet video is 2.7 minutes.

Grabbing the attention of your potential customers is now harder than ever. Each and every piece of content posted should be as long as it takes to convey the message – no longer. (BufferApp)

Keep it Simple
Focus on What is Important
Less is More

SumAll pulled together information on the optimal length of Facebook Updates, Tweets, Blog Headlines and more. The INFOGRAPHIC below is a Cheat Sheet you can use to determine the length your content should be on the various sites.

For a more detailed list, including email and video, please visit their site for their full infographic.

Grab the infographic below for a quick guide to formulating your posts and tweets.