The argument is pointless.
I have a lot of respect for Joanna Wiebe and her team at CopyHackers. But the debate between long vs. short content has gone on long enough.
Too long.
When Buzzsumo discovered that more words per post leads to more shares, people forgot one simple fact:
Correlation does not equal causation.
As my friend Nat Eliason (@NatEliason) of Sumo stated,
“The problem is when people try to reverse engineer ‘virality’ or ‘popularity’ based on meaningless variables instead of just writing something really really good.”
[bctt tweet=”It’s like everyone who thinks that if they start waking up at 6am they’ll magically become Elon Musk. @nateliason” via=”no”]
If Neil Patel finds out that the optimal time to share on Twitter is 2pm, that doesn’t mean you should jump off the bridge either.
Newsflash: You don’t have the same followers as he does. When they are active on social media has very little to do with your own tribe.
What’s the harm of reporting this type of information?
As I was going through a backlink report to see who linked to Klientboost and send a thank you note, I came across this beautiful piece (update – this article is now dead. This further demonstrates the point I’m about to make).
That article has almost everything going for it. But she forgot one simple detail:
Ouch.
As with all quality sites that link to my clients, I sent her some serious promotion love.
I felt bad that someone had fallen into the lie that creating great was all she needed.
Though I can’t read someone’s mind (I’m a marketer, not a mind-reader), it wouldn’t surprise me that these stupid factoids lead her to write a guide on surviving burnout to cope with her own pain.
How do you know whether your audience wants short or long? Make hypothesis and test it.
Or do what I do and write from the heart and don’t-give-a rip how many words you need.
If you want to keep your costs low, this article by Siddharth Bharath (VP of growth at Thinkific) should give you some killer insight how to be strategic with your time and money.
Some final thoughts from Benji Hyam (@BenjiHyam) of Grow and Convert:
“People who are unfamiliar with this space [will] think that writing a 750 word post will make them more successful than a 300 word post (or vice versa). I don’t think word count matters at all. Word count isn’t going to make one company blog more successful than another.”
Data doesn’t lie; only the analysts that misinterpret the data do.