The Long Form Content Myth: Why Top Blogs Still Use Short Form Content

Through the years, several digital marketing blogs have published studies that show that long form content performs better than short content in terms of getting more links and social shares. As a result, many businesses that want to get into content marketing are requiring long content with high minimum word counts per article.

I frequently see job posting stating that their articles need to be a minimum of 2,000 words or some other large number. But if long form content is so effective, then why are major publications still publishing short form content?

For example, Marketing Profs is an industry leader in the marketing niche with over 600,000 followers. Their publishing guidelines insist that articles should be no longer than 1,200 words.

Entrepreneur is another well known publication and they also don’t want articles longer than 1,200 words.

Even Neil Patel recommended keeping articles under 1,500 words in this Quora post.

What’s going on here? Do these successful publications not know that long form content is better with all the research out there? Or is the necessity of long form content just another content marketing myth?

The purpose of this article is to take a closer look at the “data” and examine why many top publications continue to insist on shorter content, why short content might actually be better in some cases and why you may want to consider incorporating short form content into your own content strategy.

1. Short Form Content Actually Gets More Shares Per Word (On average)

Buzzsumo published an article on Noah Kagan’s blog showing that long content tends to get more shares than short content:

OK Dork: Long Content Tends to Get Shared More than Short Content

They found that articles with 3,000 – 10,000 words get an average of 8,859 social shares while shorter articles got fewer shares (looks like around 4,500 from the chart). They concluded that you should aim to create long articles that are at least 2,000 words in length.

However, the article fails to take into account one very important factor, which is the time required to write a long article versus the time required to write a short article. You can probably write multiple short articles in the time that it takes you to write one long article.

Let’s say that instead of writing one long 3,000 word article, we decide instead to write three shorter 1,000 word articles. The chart below shows the total number of social shares when you compare multiple short articles against one long article:

So on average, you get more total social shares from writing two short articles (2,000 word written) than one long article (3,000 words written). And it took you less time to do.

It really doesn’t make sense to compare one short article to one long article because the time and resources required to create a long form article are not the same as the resources required to create a short article. When you take into account how much time it takes to create content, short form content actually performs better on average than long content in terms of getting more social exposure per time invested.

Kevin Delaney (who was formerly the managing director for the Wall Street Journal and is now the editor in chief at Quartz) also discovered that short content can perform quite well. By focus on writing short articles under 500 words and longer articles over 800 words, the Quartz team grew their readership to over 5 million readers in just 18 months.

Kevin discovered that on average, content that is under 500 words did well because people like to read short content when they are looking for quick information. He also found that content over 800 words did well because some people were looking for articles with more depth and details.

Articles between 500-800 words got less attention because they were too short to go into sufficient detail but too long to be read quickly. This phenomenon became known as the “Quartz curve”.

So short content is more efficient for getting more social media exposure, but what about SEO and ongoing traffic?

Here’s a quick look at some SEO metrics from some of the sites mentioned in this article (data from SEM Rush’s backlink analysis tool). Asides from getting lots of social shares, these sites are also getting plenty of backlinks and organic search traffic.

If long content gets more backlinks, then how are sites that create short content able to compete in the search engines? The answer is that these sites rake up tons of long tail SEO traffic and even if they get fewer links per article, they still have way more content out there that is attracting links from other sites.

The effectiveness of short content for SEO is amplified even further if you are syndicating your content. For example, this article by James Clear was syndicated on Lifehacker and accumulated a few natural backlinks. James received a 56 page authority link from a site with 92 domain authority and that doesn’t even count all the other sites he syndicated his articles to.

Studies also show that there is a correlation between social shares and increased SEO traffic, like this study conducted by Razvan Gavrilas and Cornelia Cozmiuc from Cognitive SEO. Although many SEO’s believe that social signals don’t affect search engine rankings directly, the correlation makes sense. Articles with more social shares get more traffic and when more people know about a good piece of content, it will get more links.

Some other examples of people who do well with short content are Seth Godin, who writes a daily blog post (most of which are under 200 words) and Foundr who grew their Instagram following to over 1 million followers and created a 6-figure business selling online courses.

2. Syndication

Studies that look at short and long content also don’t take into account the amplification effects of syndication. Most sites that accept syndicated content, like Entrepreneur, don’t accept content that is too long.

James Clear gets over 100,000 new email subscribers each year and one of the secrets to his success is syndicating his best blog articles to other popular sites. Most of his articles are under 1,500 words and some are even shorter than 1,000 words.

I did a quick analysis of James Clear’s site in 2016 and found that he syndicated 59 of his articles to Business Insider. His articles got an average of 5,070 shares on his own site and 3,490 shares on Business Insider. James increased social shares by 69% by syndicating on just one site.

James also syndicated his articles to other sites like Entrepreneur and Lifehacker, resulting in even more exposure. Take a look at this article that he syndicated to Lifehacker (which got over 40,000 views):

A short article that gets syndicated on popular blogs can easily outperform a longer article in terms of overall exposure and social shares.

3. Resources / Cost

Another important consideration is the cost and resources required to produce long content. I’ve created 5,000 word articles that did really well, but some of my longest articles literally took weeks to complete.

According to Glassdoor, a content writer costs an average of $42,000 a year and you should expect to pay even more for a top quality writer (up to around $70,000). A really in depth blog article could cost thousands of dollars to create, and that’s just for one article.

A study by Hubspot shows that businesses that blog 11 or more times per month got more than 3x more traffic than blogs that post on 1-3 times per month. The study also found that companies that published 16 or more times per month got 4x more leads than companies that only published 0-4 times per month.

Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blogging-frequency-benchmarks

Another cost that people rarely talk about is personal energy. Sometimes it takes more mental energy to create really long articles on a consistent basis, which can lead to burn out.

Long form content takes a lot of time to create (and it can be very costly), which can make it difficult to publish frequently. In reality, businesses need to manage their resources so creating extensively long content on a regular basis might not be practical.

4. Short Articles Have Better Engagement

Although businesses like to focus on traffic as a measurement of success, engagement is also very important. After all, what’s the point of writing an article if no one reads it?

A study by Nielsen Norman group showed that people preferred to read short articles over long articles. Another study by the Demand Gen Group showed that 95% of B2B buyers preferred shorter content formats.

People tend to have short attention spans when they are online and an article in Time magazine reported that 55% of people spent less than 15 seconds on a page. People also read less than 60% of an article on average.

Medium focuses on engagement rather than content length and according to a study they did, they found that the ideal blog post should be readable in 7 minutes which comes out to 1,600 words. What this means is that people generally spent less time on articles that were too long.

As content writers, we need to balance the need to go in depth with our content against people’s desire to spend time reading it. Although people will often invest time into reading long content if they are very interested in it, short content formats might be better in other cases.

5. Long Content Can Fail Horribly

Another big drawback of long form content is that it can still fail after you’ve invested considerable time and resources into it.

Dale Cudmore spent over 20 hours creating the best guide for creating a resume. He invested time into making his guide visually attractive and more in depth than other similar guides that were currently ranking in Google. However, despite a solid effort to promote it, the guide did not perform as well as hoped and the site has since shut down.

Short articles can be a great way to test out ideas before investing into longer content. Spending time and money on long content can be a dangerous way to burn through resources quickly, especially if you are inexperienced in content marketing.

6. Averages are Meaningless

Although data driven studies are fun and interesting, averages are something meaningless when it comes to practical application.

One of the most shared posts on my blog was my study of LinkedIn Pulse, which I published while the platform was still in closed beta. The article was only around 1,000 words long, which is really short for digital marketing content, but it got over 5,000 social shares.

The reason it did well was because it presented new information at the time and was useful and interesting to readers. Short content can do well if it’s unique and high quality, so don’t restrict yourself to only writing long content.

When writing, focus on being the exception and not the average. If your article needs to be long to outperform others, then make it long. But if a short article makes more sense, then write a short article. Focus on quality and performance rather than obsessing over length.

7. Doesn’t Apply to All Niches

Creating long form content makes sense in the digital marketing niche, but long content isn’t necessarily better in all niches. In the recipe niche, for example, articles are often under 800 words. People are looking for recipes and not long drawn out articles and if you do a search for any recipe, most of the ones you’ll find are relatively short.

Other niches where short content works well include beauty and fashion (where visuals are important), jokes and quotes and art and photography. Long form content seems to do well in “how to” niches where people may be looking for detailed information to solve their problems, but shorter content is often more appropriate in entertainment niches.

Another thing worth mentioning is that sometimes tools will get more links and search engine traffic than content. Google, for example, is one of the most highly trafficked sites on the internet and also has more links than most other sites despite having little written content on the page.

The point here is that if your web page is valuable enough to people, it can easily outperform other pages on the web regardless of content length.

A Few Caveats

Before you jump on board the short form content train, there are a few caveats you should be aware of.

1) Short form content seems to work better in some niches than others

In the recipe niche, for example, articles shorter than 1,000 words seem to work well while in the digital marketing niche, articles over 1,000 words tend to be better because marketing ideas and concepts often require more words to explain thoroughly.

Take a look at how long articles that other people in your niche are and plan accordingly. Don’t just look at a few blogs, but analyze blogs that are creating long content and blogs that are creating short content. If people are using both long and short content in your niche, then you should be able to make either approach work for your content.

2) Short content seems to work better if you already have a large following or can reach a large targeted audience quickly

But this doesn’t mean that you need a large audience to start out with a short content strategy. But be prepared to write consistently and have a plan to grow your audience as quickly as possible for the best results.

Seth Godin grew a large following by authoring several books, public speaking and other methods. Foundr and Daniel DiPiazza were able to rapidly grow their audience through Instagram. And James Clear used syndication to significantly amplify his reach.

Short content also seems to work better if you publish frequently. Creating content regularly allows you to get more social shares, allowing more people to find out about you and your articles.

3) Short and long content tend to have different content promotions strategies

If you want to succeed with either long or short content, you have to have the right content promotion strategy to correspond with your approach.

People that use short content tend go for an overall branding approach or focus on social media rather than promoting individual articles on their site. Growing a large social media following and creating short content regularly can allow people to reach more and more people on a consistent basis. Other tactics like guest posting frequently on other blogs can allow someone to grow their brand awareness quickly.

With long content, writers can create content that stands out from other articles and promote each article individually with email outreach. Inserting quotes from influencers is another tactic that people use to promote long form content.

Short and long content use different promotional approaches, so be sure that your content promotion strategy works well with your content creation strategy.

To Sum It Up…

The purpose of this article isn’t to say that short content is better than long content or vice versa. The point is that both short and long form content can perform very well and as marketers, we need to be open minded and not restricted ourselves to either format. In fact, I’m a fan of using both long and short content.

Long form content can drive a lot of long tail SEO traffic, particularly if you are promoting it heavily. For competitive keyword phrases that can drive a lot of traffic, it might make sense to invest the time into longer content.

Long content can also be easier to promote as many businesses aren’t going to invest the resources into long content. Creating a longer and more detailed article can be an easier way to stand out with your content, so you may want to invest in longer content if you are also going to invest in a strong promotional campaign for your content.

Alternatively, short form content can be used for non-competitive lower volume keywords that people aren’t aggressively trying to rank for. Most businesses won’t expend resources to promote long tail content because it’s more efficient just focus on creating more content. It can also be used when you want to create content to engage your audience, i.e., articles that don’t have SEO goals.

People are also more likely to read short content so short content can be better for maintaining engagement. Shorter content can also be a good way to test out ideas before you spend too much time on a piece of content. If it works out well, you can expand it into a longer article later.

To decide on content length, look at how long other competing content is. Think about how long your content will have to be to thoroughly cover the ideas that you want to present.

If you’re a marketing manager, rather than focusing on word counts, think about better ways you can measure success.

Ultimately, a good strategy will have a mix of both long and short form content to capitalize on the strengths of both. What do you think? Have businesses become too hung up on content length?