Sharing content on social media networks and engaging with the audience is one of the most popular ways to connect with a large number of people in an economical and time-saving manner.
But you need to be very careful regarding the length of your posts on social media.
Too long posts possess the risk of boring your audience while a too-short post may not be able to give complete information and your audience may feel distracted.
In this article, we share the ideal length of posts for some of the very popular social media channels.
The social media platforms taken into consideration for this article are:
- Youtube
- The ideal length of a post on Facebook.
Facebook users usually like shorter posts. The maximum number of likes, comments, and shares are received on short-length posts.
Length of Facebook organic posts:
The ideal length of an organic post on Facebook is 1 to 80 characters. According to research done by BuzzSumo when 800 million Facebook posts were taken into consideration depicted that a post with less than 50 characters was more liked and got customer engagement than longer posts. In another research by Jeff Bullas showed that posts with 80 characters or less got 66% higher engagement than longer posts.
Length of Facebook Paid Posts:
The ideal length of a Facebook paid post is 5 to 18 words. These are further subdivided into three parts- headline, main text, and description. According to a report by AdEspresso who analyzed 37,259 Facebook posts, short, clear, and concise posts yield the best results.
- The ideal length of the facebook post headline is 5 words.
- The ideal length of the main text of a facebook paid post is 14 words. This is the text that is written as a snippet above an image or video.
- The ideal length for the description that is written below the headline is 18 words.
Length of Facebook videos
The success of any facebook video is measured by the time for which it is watched by the users. This is also known as the video retention rate.
- According to research by Kinetic Social in 2016, which tracked two billion social ad impressions, reported that the videos of a duration of 30-60 seconds were viewed completely by 44% of the users.
- Videos with a duration of 30 seconds were viewed completely by 26% of users.
- Videos with a duration of over two minutes were viewed completely by 31% of users.
- Another report in 2018 analyzed that a video of 30 to 50-second duration is liked by 33% of the users.
Thus, be it an organic post, a paid post, or a video; keep it short, clear, and to the point to get maximum engagement.
- The ideal length of a post on Instagram
Instagram is a media-centric social media platform. It consists of images and videos.
But to get maximum engagement for your images and videos, you need to add captions and descriptions to your posts.
Length of Organic Instagram post
The ideal length of an organic Instagram post is 138 to 150 characters. Writing a clear and compelling caption will add value to your post and you will get maximum engagement.
The character limit that is allowed on Instagram for a caption is 2200 characters. But to get the attention of the viewers you should keep it short so that users may get your point while scrolling through their feeds.
Length of a paid Instagram post
The recommended limit by Instagram for paid posts is 125 characters or less.
Following this character limit will allow users to read your caption effectively as your content won’t be truncated.
Length of Instagram hashtags
Instagram hashtags should have a strategic approach just like the keywords in a blog post or article where the quality of keywords matters and not the quantity. Putting up too many hashtags will make your post look spam.
The ideal number of Instagram hashtags is 5 to 9 per post with a character limit of less than 24 for each hashtag.
The allowed limit for the number of Instagram hashtags is 30 but according to research by TrackMaven, the highest engagement was received on posts with nine hashtags.
- The ideal length of a post on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a unique social network with more than 546 million professionals using it. The audience here is always looking for content in the form of articles and usually like the long-form content. For other posts, short content is recommended. Let’s take a look at the ideal length of a LinkedIn post.
Length of Organic LinkedIn post
The ideal length of an organic LinkedIn post is 25 words or less. This is because if you post a longer content, your message will cut off at the 140 character mark and a read more button will be displayed which might distract the user to other posts.
Length of Paid LinkedIn post
This length is the same as the organic post.
Length of LinkedIn Articles
According to a research by Paul Shapiro, the founder of Search Wilderness, in which he analyzed more than 3000 successful posts on LinkedIn, the posts with average words between 1900 and 2000 performed the best.
The articles with words between 1900 and 2000 got the maximum number of likes, comments, and shares. Thus, the ideal word limit of an article on LinkedIn is 1900 to 2000.
Length of LinkedIn Article Headline
According to the same research, the ideal limit of the headline of an article on LinkedIn is between 40 to 49 characters.
Length of LinkedIn videos
The allowed time duration of a video on LinkedIn is 10 minutes but this limit is not recommended. The ideal length of a video on LinkedIn is 30 seconds. According to a study, videos with a duration of 30 seconds or less has a 200% completion rate.
- The ideal length of a post on Twitter
In 2017, Twitter has doubled the character limit to increase the room for writers. The recommended character limit for Twitter posts is mentioned below.
Length of Organic Twitter post
According to a report by Buddy Media, tweets with 100 characters or less receive the maximum engagement which is 17% higher than the longer posts. This might be because shorter posts are easy to read and comprehend. Also, retweeters can add their message to a tweet, so, on shorter tweets, they get more space to add their content.
Length of Paid Twitter Post
This is the same as the organic post.
Length of Twitter Hashtags
The ideal length of a Twitter hashtag is 6 characters which are composed of a few letters or a single word.
- The ideal length of a post on YouTube
About 400 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube’s server every minute. This implies that you should focus on keywords and descriptions to rank higher in its Search Engine Result Pages.
The ideal length of a YouTube Video
The motive behind posting a video on YouTube is that people watch it and you acquire user retention. You need to analyze how long your videos are watched by the users.
According to research by ReelSEO, where 50 YouTube videos were analyzed found that the videos with an average duration of 2 minutes and 54 seconds perform the best. Thus, the ideal limit of a YouTube video is 3 minutes.
Length of YouTube Title
The ideal limit of a YouTube video title is 70 characters including spaces. You must ensure that you include volume-rich keywords to rank higher in the YouTube search engine as well as on Google.
Length of YouTube Video Description
The ideal limit for the description of a YouTube video is 157 characters. These descriptions appear as the snippet below your videos, so be careful while writing these descriptions and make use of your targeted keywords as these will also help you rank higher in search results.
- The ideal length of a post on Pinterest
Pinterest is a social media platform comprising images. The size of these images matters to engage your audience.
Size of an image on Pinterest
The ideal size of an image on Pinterest is 735 X 1102 pixels. The required minimum width is 600 pixels with an aspect ratio of 2:3.
Length of Description on Pinterest
According to various studies, the ideal length of a description of an image on Pinterest is 200 characters. The description with this size receives the maximum engagements and repins.
Conclusion
The various length and sizes are easy to understand. I suggest you make this a habit of following these limits in the year to come and get the maximum engagement- likes, views, comments and shares, and rank higher in search results as well as in the minds of your potential customers.
You can also run an A/B test to determine whether these limits are ideal for you and your audience follows.
Optimize the length of your content and you’ll be more likely to engage and convert your audience.
Well said, Bartek.
True, as a general rule, short posts on social media perform better than long ones.
Hey Bartek,
that’s very well researched post, never had a thought of keeping length of social media into consideration before posting.