Impact of Word Count on Social Shares

I have so far written around 200,000 words of content. Some of my posts are long and detailed, others can be amazingly short. I experimented with various formats over the years but was unable to find the exact pattern of an ideal post size for my own blog.

Naturally, word count is only one of the factors which influence social sharing. Other, more prominent factors include  topic, title, imagery, relevance, time sensitivity, newsworthiness and uniqueness. Still, I wanted to find out if there was a perfect post length and this lead to development of a “Word Count and Social Shares” plugin for WordPress.

Features:

  • CSV Export
  • Display Diagram
  • Limit report by date range
  • Total words on the blog (or date range)
  • Individual post word count (sortable table of posts, word counts, social shares)
  • Average post length

Social Shares

The above chart tells me that my audience reacts well to posts longer than 700 words. There is a very unusual drop around 1500 and another sharp jump at roughly 2500 words (which is likely just one or two posts).

Dan Petrovic, the managing director of DEJAN, is Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation. Dan is a web author, innovator and a highly regarded search industry event speaker.
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6886-3211

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3 thoughts on “Impact of Word Count on Social Shares”

  1. John Doherty broke down the attributes of the most linked content on SEOmoz last year which I think is an interesting read, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-kind-of-content-gets-links-in-2012. Of particular interest was the number of linking domains to posts that were list style and included both video and images – bonanza!

  2. This is a typical case of statistics nullified by cause, causation problems… You should rate your articles content on a scale from 0 – 10 and check for correlations influencing your results. I bet you will see in no time that longer content mostly covers the more interesting, never seen before types of issues that tend to go more viral. I would be very interested in that analysis.

  3. Ryan Rollan says:

    Personally, i do not believe that the size of the content does matter, as long as you capture the user’s interest then its good to go. but anyway we have our own point of view and i thank you for sharing us this great idea. keep posting.