Long-Form Content and Its Place on Social Media

Social media has become an outlet where everyone is trying to say what they need to say in as few words as possible. And it’s not that there isn’t much to say; it’s more of an issue of people’s attention spans decreasing.

Microsoft reported in 2015 that consumers have an attention span that is less than a goldfish.

Content creators started creating content that only lasts a few seconds, and this has led to shorter Instagram stories and shorter Facebook posts. But we also know that Google likes in-depth articles, and it has hinted at that as far back as 2013. Independent studies have been conducted by marketing companies that also prove this theory.

So, where does long-form content fit then?

Long-Form Content’s Place in Social Media

Social media and long-form content go together well, but you obviously can’t post a 4,000-word post to many platforms. Instead, the content can be used as a gold mine for social media. A long-form post may provide you with content for an entire month.

You can use a post to:

• Present facts on social media
• Pull out interesting sentences to make a post
• Use statistics to entice social media users

Sometimes, snippets and other portions of the post will be used 4 – 5 times a day for as long as half a month. You might think that followers will get annoyed or agitated, but the truth is that a lot of them will not see the post.

Promoting the post multiple times on social media will allow you to target users in different time zones or that may not be on at certain times of the day.

This post on how to boost credit scores is a little over 2,700 words.

It’s an informative post, and it’s a post that has a lot of great content that can be used on social media:

• Testimonials, which can be turned into highly engaging material
• Discount codes that can be used as highly shared and engaging posts
• Questions and answers to questions everyone has about credit scores
• Statistics, such as credit utilization, being 30% of a credit score
• Headers that can be turned into catchy posts
• Images that can be repurposed and posted on social media

Content inside of the article can also be used to create related images. These images work very well on social media because studies show that users are far more engaging. Facebook posts that have images included get 2.3x the engagement than posts without images.

There’s so much great content in a long-form post that there’s never a reason not to include this type of content into a social media strategy.

You also have the option of posting the content to platforms that are long-form friendly, such as LinkedIn and Google+ (although the platform has not picked up steam).

Short posts, while they still hold a great purpose in content marketing and blogging, they do not have the same level of detail and statistics as a long-form post. When you need to explain a topic in detail, don’t let social media be a reason to break the topic into smaller posts.