What is the ideal length for a social media post?

We all know about Twitter's 140-character limit (which has been relaxed slightly in recent months) - but is 140 characters really the optimal amount of characters for a post on Twitter? What about on other social networks? To find out the optimal length for a social media post, I scoured the research to see if there were any definitive answers to which post lengths got the most engagement. The update length limit varies by the social media network, and while only Twitter has stringent, short character limits, I found that just because you can write more extensively doesn't necessarily mean you should.

Ideal post lengths for social media networks:

• Twitter: Twitter was where it all started in terms of artificially shortening posts as part of the design of the network - 140 characters was the limit from the start. However, if you can be even briefer, so much the better. Buddy Media found that tweets with less than 100 characters performed 17% better than longer posts.
• Facebook: Of the big three social networks, Facebook allows the most space for text in updates (a staggering 63k+ characters!), despite this, the best-received Facebook posts have less an 80 characters, according to Jeff Bullas (though it is even better to try to cut your posts to less than 40 characters, no small feat). Facebook shows that just because there is a lot of real estate doesn't mean you should use necessarily it.  
• Instagram: On Instagram the focus is the visual, so Sprout Social recommends you keep your captions short and sweet - between 138-and 150 characters, even though the max allowed is 2,200 characters. But even shorter may be better: Instagram itself specifies that that only the first 3 lines of a caption are shown in feeds, a limit of 125 characters.

What can we learn from these findings? Overall, shorter posts/updates are better. This clever infographic below from Buffer and SumAll illustrates the optimal length for various social media networks. When you are in the process of writing your own social media updates, Sprout Social also has a great social media post character counter to keep you in line. The infographic below also covers optimal headline length, number of hashtags and blog post length, which I will cover in a future post.

How to conduct a social media audit

Before you or you company is join a new social media network or launch a social media marketing campaign, it is a good idea to do a social media audit. So what is a social media audit? Despite the intimidating name, the social media audit process is basically just taking stock of all of your social media properties and assessing how well you are doing on each of them. Here are 5 easy steps to get you well on your way to completing a social media audit.

1. Take stock of all of your social media accounts

The first step is to create a spreadsheet with all of your social media accounts, their URLs, the last date you have posted, the frequency of posting, and the number of followers. You may also include other columns related to metrics you may be tracking on each platform, like referrals to your website, or changes in followers over time. You can create your own custom spreadsheet, but you can also find examples of social media audit templates online. Buffer has shared a great Google Doc that you can copy for your own audit, as seen below. This step of the process is also a good time to consolidate all of your passwords for every social media account, and if you are working with a team, verify who has access to each platform and who is responsible for updating each account.

2. Perform a search on social media and Google.

Though you probably will be up to date with the social media accounts that you are updating regularly, there may be some accounts that have fallen by the wayside over the years (Tumblr, Flickr, etc.). During a social media audit, it is important to do a search on social media networks to check to see if you are missing any accounts that may have gone dormant or have been started before you joined the team. If you have a larger company, others (both affiliated with the company or not) may have even started unofficial pages, or these may have been automatically created.

3. Check your branding

It is important at this stage to make sure that your visual and content branding is consistent across all social media networks. Make sure you have the most current logo and brand identity on each page. It's also important to make sure you have appropriately sized backgrounds and headers for each social media network - since these sizes actually change pretty often. Sprout Social has an always-updated guide to these social media picture sizes. Beyond images, it is useful to make sure your contact information and biography are up-to-date and that your tone is consistent across platforms.

4. Assess how these sites are reaching your desired targets

This part is a bit more qualitative and requires that you engage with your current social media strategy. Example questions you and your team may want to ask are:

• What is the target market for each of these sites?
• Who are we hoping to reach? Are we reaching them?
• How will we know if we are successful? 
• What are our goals on each platform?

You can check how you are doing on your goals, by checking your metrics for each of the social media networks you are active on. Twitter and Facebook, for example offer detailed, downloadable analytics from within their own dashboards.

5. Revise your plan...or not

At this stage you may find that some of your social media platforms could use some work, or perhaps you may be able to identify a gap that would be filled by joining another social media network. Through this audit process you will be able to make more informed decisions on next steps for your current networks, as well as when it is time to expand or consolidate your social media efforts. There is also no singular way to conduct an audit, and a lot of the process depends on your specific objectives and goals.

Developing a social media audit may seem like an involved process, especially depending on how detailed you want to get with metrics - but it is manageable! And it is worth it for the added peace of mind before making any big social media decisions. If you or your company needs any help conducting a full social media audit - New Median can help!

The top 5 most useful video metrics

An eye-catching, relevant video (or a cat video, if that make sense of your brand!) is one of the best ways to increase engagement on social media, email or your website. According to ComScore, website visitors are 64% more likely to buy a product after watching a video, and they stay on a site 2 minutes longer than those who don’t view videos. Aside from the ever-growing YouTube, you can now post videos natively in Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and more (as well as sharing your video links across channels).

The most basic video metric is view count, which helps with understanding the reach and impression of a video. However, similar to page views, this metric really doesn't tell you much about how well your video actually performed, and if it resonated with the intended audience. Moreover, "view" means different things on different platforms. 

Before you start: The first thing to consider is the goal of the video, as this will inform what metrics are most important to you: Are you answering a question? Explaining a new product? Promoting an upcoming event? Giving a behind-the-scenes tour? Each of these different types of videos will have different goals and different potential audiences. If you are looking to get deeper insights into a video's impact, consider these 5 other video metrics.

1. Time Played: This metric takes view count one step further - how far did the viewer make it into your video? Did they only last 10 seconds/30 seconds/the whole video? This metric will help you figure out if your video length is about right, and can help you pinpoint places where viewers "left." The image below shows the engagement rates for the duration of a video by the company Wistia. As you can see, engagement goes down over time, but replays (in red) occur more frequently at certain times, indicating particularly interesting content.

1. Comments: Monitoring your video's comments is a great initial way to measure engagement and audience reaction. How many people are talking about what you posted on the video itself? Is the feedback generally positive or negative? Were people confused? Appreciative?
2. Shares: If users are sharing your video on other platforms, this shows that the video has proven useful/interesting/entertaining enough to promote on their own social networks (or business). How many times has your item shared, whether on social media, or on other sites? Did it go viral? On which platforms was it most successful? 

1. Video Page Statistics - If you have access to your web site's analytics (through Google Analytics or another platform), you can check out how the pages that host your videos are performing.
   1. Play Rate: The play rate is the percentage of visitors to a page that actually played the video (versus clicking away or closing the page). This metric can help you determine if your video is on the right page, and if it is introduced logically. Changing the position of the video on the page or the description leading to the video can help improve the play rate.
   2. Time on page:  Did visitors stay longer on your video pages versus other pages? Hopefully they stayed to watch the video - but did they also stick around for other content?
   3. Bounce Rate: This measures what percentage of visitors to your page left the page without interacting with content on the page (clicking on a link, etc), or going onto another page in your site. Is the bounce rate higher or lower than normal on your pages with videos?
2. Conversions: If there is a specific call to action (CTA) embedded within in your video (or at the end) - how many viewers actually completed it? For example, if you CTA is for visitors to join your newsletter, how many actually ended up signing up after watching the video? Just because you encourage viewers to do something, doesn't mean they will actually do it!

View count is a place to start, but with this upgraded toolkit of metrics, you can start really assessing your video's performance and engagement. Video is here to stay, so now is the perfect time to start optimizing your analytic strategy!