Are longer or shorter blog posts more effective?

I recently got into a conversation with a good friend who has a new cool social media tool that helps businesses manage their blog content, their bloggers, and the scheduling of their posts.  Looks like a cool product, and I think we’re going to give it a try.  Anyway, as we often do, he and I were bickering amiably over the recommended length of blog posts, and I thought I’d take a look at the posts we’ve put out there over the past nine months, and see whether or not our shorter or longer posts do better.

Some opinions on blog post length

My friend claims that they recommend blog posts of between 300 and 500 words in length.  I mentioned that our SEO / SEM advisors had previously recommended we go higher than 500, and ideally over 750.  We’ve therefore targeted 750+ words for our posts.

There are a great number of opinions and calculated research statistics on the topic of blog post length.  This post on Hubspot from Corey Wainwright says (essentially) that it doesn’t matter too much. This post from Matthew Barby, also on Hubspot, from 2015 says that longer is better, and – more specifically – that blog posts between 2,250 and 2,500 words in length get more organic traffic (and his data set was pretty big). He also shows that blog posts over 2,500 words get shared the most on social media.

Image Source: This great blog post from Hubspot

So I thought I’d see how RewardStream’s blog compared.

A little about our blog posts

Between October 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016 our content team turned out a modest 57 posts.  For a company our size, we could do worse.  That’s an average of about 6 posts per month.   We’ve written about 59,000 words, averaging 1,115 words per post. These posts are waaaaay too long according to my friend, and possibly overkill.

I put together a little Venngage infographic to show the results. (You can click on the image below to bring these up).

Essentially the results show that:

• Blog posts averaging 1,300 words in length generally performed the best (the longest time spent on page)
• Blog posts averaging 929 words generally performed the poorest.

That would seem to make sense, right?  It should take people longer to read longer posts.  However of our five (5) weakest (or lowest-engagement) posts, two were over 1,000 words in length, and one of those was over 1,700 words in length.

And of our top ten high-engagement posts, four were under 1,000 words. Some of those had infographics included, which explains the longer engagement times.  Our top five posts were all over 1,000 words, and three were over 1,400 words in length.  These were also some of the posts that had the most social shares. This kind of agrees with the 2015 Hubspot blog post from Matthew above.

• Our post that garnered the longest average engagement was 1,491 words in length.
• Our post that garnered the least, was 938 words in length.

In reality, the engagement levels are all over the map.  Some shorter posts engage better, and many longer posts cause people to disengage quickly.  Overall, I think my friend was more right than me (although I may never admit that to him).  We don’t need to write 1,000+ word posts to engage with our audience.   And maybe our data set is just a little too small for projections.

We’ve still got a lot to learn about optimizing our blogging process, and we’ll be writing more about it in the upcoming months.

By the way, this post is 620. words in length. How was it for you?