You may have read our ‘What is the Best Length for a Blog Post‘, and people seem to appreciate the thought that went into that, and people in social media marketing we wanted to crack the code on what the ideal length for a tweet would would be. Is it using every last character that they allow?
What is the ideal length for tweets?
Two different reports each came to the same conclusion… drum roll please: the ideal length of a tweet is 100 characters.
Tweets with less than 100 characters get 17% more engagement.
According to Track Social and Buddy Media as referenced by Twitter for Business 100 characters for is optimal for the most engagement on Twitter because it ‘allowed people to retweet what the original poster said and still add their own commentary.” In this scenario we’re talking pre-2015 Twitter conventions but the real crux of the suggestion is still relevant: create medium length tweets so that people feel like they can add and repost without the message getting too long.
What research do Track Social and Buddy Media give as to how they came to this conclusion? They analyzed engagement with 100 top brands on Twitter and recognized that the medium length received the most retweets, favorites/likes and mentions.
What are some other reasons people might like 100 character / medium length tweets?
Well the The Ideal Length of Everything on the Buffer blog speaks about how people on Facebook seem to engage more with smaller posts, despite the fact there is not character limit, it seems people might be pre-disposed for interacting with this kind of limited character content across the board (the Facebook ideal character count is 40 characters – pretty small.) 100 Character tweet length may just be our desire for having our content in bite-sized chunks.
If I can read and comprehend what you’re saying very quickly and I’m on the go, or just lightly engaging with social media on my phone, than I can respond or retweet without worrying about some intricacies I didn’t consider.
Other important points about getting the highest twitter engagement on your tweets
- Tweet images every time you can – They get on-average twice as many retweets as tweets without them.
- Add relevant and highly engaged with hashtags – Tweets with hashtags also get twice as much engagement as those without them.
- Add links to your tweets – Tweets with links are 86% more likely to be retweeted than those without.
- Retweet other people’s stuff, comment, make Twitter a nice place to be – Just chatting with people on Twitter, and engagement positively with their stuff (not just expecting they engage with yours) is really the way to make sure that Twitter is positive and not just for promotion.
Focus on giving the people what they want! Not just what you are promoting at the moment. Twitter is better when we recognize the needs of our audience and yes, share our best content… but also try to curate the best of our niche/industry, share useful information, quotes and statistics and even funny stuff. Because when you’re positive, funny and uplifting your chances of really catching people’s attention are much higher. So focus on the 100 character tweets, but even more so – focus on adding value to people’s lives on Twitter.