Call her a preditor.

Elisa Lagos was an Edward R. Murrow and Peabody award-winning TV producer for ABC News.

Make that editor.

Make that both.

Elisa, now a communications associate at World Education Services, wasn’t alone doing double duty at ABC. In fact, many broadcasters now have two, two, TWO jobs in one.

Here’s how reporters’ lives have changed in the last few years:

• Three in 10 journalists are gone. Employment has sunk 30% since 2002, according to Pew’s “State of the News Media” study. Now journalists look to their left, and there’s nobody there. Fewer hands means more work for the remaining staff.
• Their jobs are expanding. Nearly six in 10 journalists surveyed by PWR New Media have added web work to their existing responsibilities. They’re not just reporting, they’re also writing social media posts, producing the infographic and making the video.
• There’s no letting up. The news cycle? 24/7. The news hole? Infinite.
• It’s tough out there. No wonder nearly seven out of 10 journalists believe their jobs have gotten harder over the past five years, according to a survey by media platform ISEBOX.

This problem will only grow worse. I had lunch recently with a friend from The New York Times. Every day, he told me, he looks around at his colleagues and asks, “How can the Times afford to keep paying all of these salaries?”

How can you help?

How can public relations professionals take advantage of — wait, I mean help — given this sad situation? (Hey, we can be preditory, too, right?)

1. Write releases that are ready to be read.

Half of the journalists in the ISEBOX study produce at least five articles a week. One in five produce more than 11 articles a week. A well-written press release can help these tired, busy professionals do their jobs better and more easily.

But instead of the hierarchical blurtation of facts that makes up most releases, why not write a story? A real story, that’s ready for publication. It takes great writing skills to write something your target audience wants to read, but it can be worth it.

Best-case scenario: You’ll convince a reporter that there’s a story here, worthy of pursuing. Worst case: A busy journalist publishes the release as is.

“We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such,” according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

2. Make it easy on the journalist (and the reader).

Write a one-minute release. Make it easy to scan with display copy, such as subheads, bullets and bold-faced lead-ins. Produce finished, publication-worthy written communications.

3. Deliver the goods.

Include the infographics, images, videos and other news assets journalists need to do all of their jobs.

In other words, become a preditor yourself.

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PR professionals have been married to the traditional PR writing approach since Ivy Lee created the news release more than 100 years ago.

Why, then, do we need a new approach?

With an estimated 3,000 releases going out over the wires each day — that’s one every 29 seconds — the impact of your traditional PR piece ain’t what it used to be.

In fact, fewer than 50% of all traditional PR pieces ever get covered, according to PR Newswire’s own research. Dennis L. Wilcox and Lawrence W. Nolte, authors of Public Relations Writing and Media Techniques, go further. They estimate that some 55% to 97% of all PR pieces sent to media outlets are never used.

Why?

What’s wrong with releases?

Most news releases are:

1. Irrelevant

Most journalists receive more than 50 releases a day, according to a survey by Greentarget. But those releases aren’t useful to their target audiences:

• Most trade magazine editors surveyed said fewer than half of the releases they receive are relevant to their publication, according to a survey by Thomas Rankin Associates.
• 65% to 75% of city editors surveyed believed press releases promote “products, services and other activities that don’t legitimately deserve promotion,” write Wilcox and Nolte.
• No wonder journalists’ biggest pet peeves are releases that don’t pertain to their beats or aren’t relevant to the audiences they serve, according to the Greentarget survey.

“I recently got a message from a reporter working at a small local paper who received 80 press releases in one day,” says Jeremy Porter, digital communications strategist. “Of them, only two were relevant to the information his paper covers.”

2. Poorly written

Most PR pros are bad at pitch writing, according to a study by New York-based DS Simon Productions.

• Television news professionals reported that only 41% of the pitches they receive are good.
• Those TV journalists say that only 33% of the PR people they work with are knowledgeable about the program they’re pitching.
• And pitches are getting “significantly worse” than they used to be, according to 22% of the reporters, editors and analysts surveyed in a Softletterpoll.

Entry-level PR pros are worse, according to a study by Michigan State University and Calgary’s Mount Royal University.

In the study, more than 950 members of the Public Relations Society of America and the Canadian Public Relations Society gave PR pros with five or fewer years of experience failing grades in writing skills.

That’s too bad. Because writing tops the list of five essential PR skills, according to Wilcox.

3. Ineffective

As a result, according to Greentarget, journalists turn to other sources for stories:

• 68% of journalists surveyed by Greentarget get their story ideas from sources.
• 41% get ideas from other news outlets.
• Just 34% get them from releases.

Write better releases.

But a well-written release can help you gain media coverage, reach clients and customers directly, get shared as social media content and draw more visitors to your site.

So how can public relations professionals and PR firms write releases that are among the 3% to 45% of those that actually get the word out? Write releases that:

• Are relevant and valuable to the journalist and her readers. Focus on “news you can use to live your life better” and tipsheets and other value-added story angles.
• Tell a story instead of just reporting facts. The traditional news release format, with its terse hierarchical blurtation of facts, is so tedious and dry, it makes folks’ eyes glaze over.
• Make it easy to read and use. Subheads, bullets and other display approaches make details easier for the reporter to read. Multimedia elements make the release easier to use.

Good public relations writing is good strategic communication.

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Sure, Twitter has a 280-character limit. But just because Twitter has doubled its 140-character limit doesn’t mean you should use all of them.

So what’s the ideal length of a tweet? A hashtag? How else can you make your tweets more readable and engaging? Let’s look at the research:

1. Write long tweets.

So you’ve written your blog post, and now you want to get the word out on Twitter. How long should your tweet be? 190 characters? Longer than 140 characters?

Turns out longer tweets get most engagements, according to an analysis by Sotrender and the Chicago Tribune

Why?

Retweets, likes, replies, impressions, link clicks, and profile clicks increase with length. You’ll get more engagements if your tweets are 240-259 words, according to an analysis of tweets by the Chicago Tribune.

2. Use hashtags … but not too many.

What about hashtags? We’ve all seen people tweet 140 characters to 280 on hashtags. So how long is too long?

Let’s look at the research:

• Use hashtags, according to research by Buffer Media. Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement of tweets without them.
• But don’t overuse them. Tweets with one or two hashtags get 21% higher engagement than those without, Buffer found. But engagement drops when you add more.
• Make them short. Keep them to 6 characters or less, recommends Vanessa Doctor from Hashtags.org.

3. Make tweets easy to read.

Retweets on average scored 6.47 on the Flesh-Kincaid Index, according to Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s viral marketing scientist. Random tweets scored even lower: 6.04 years on the Flesch-Kincaid Index.

Zarrella should know. He spent nine months analyzing 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets to find what makes some messages travel the world while others just stay home on the couch.

“Easy-to-read posts are more liked, commented on, and shared on social media,” according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

To make sure your tweets get retweeted, aim for 6th to 7th grade level on the Flesch test. Don’t like your score? Reduce your grade level by reducing sentence length and word length.

4. Write simple sentences. Period.

Zarrella also found that retweets are heavier on nouns, proper nouns and third-person verbs than tweets in general. That suggests that newsy, headline-style tweets — subject, verb, object — are more likely to go viral.

Want to see your tweet go viral? Write mostly simple sentences.

And don’t drop the punctuation. Some 98% of retweets contain some form of punctuation, compared with 86% of normal tweets, Zarrella found.

So don’t forget the colons, periods, commas and hyphens. But do forget semicolons — “the only unretweetable punctuation mark,” according to Zarrella.

5. Keep words short.

Retweets actually have more syllables than ordinary tweets — 1.62 syllables per word vs. 1.58, Zarrella found. Outside the Twitterverse, experts suggest aiming for two-syllable words, so both measures are still, understandably, simple.

Want your tweets to spread? Write mostly in one- and two-syllable words.

And skip the slang. Lazy language like lol, gonna and hey are among the 20 least retweetable words in the English language, Zarrella found. So cut the vernacular.

___

Sources: Kurt Gessler, “Twitter length study: Do longer tweets drive more engagement and referral traffic?,” Medium, Jan. 8, 2020

Ethan Pancer, et. al., “How Readability Shapes Social Media Engagement,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 29(2), October 2018

Dan Macsai, “Report: Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter,” Fast Company, Sept. 25, 2009

Dan Zarrella, “The Science of ReTweets: Viral Content Sharing on Twitter” (PDF), 2009

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While a picture paints a thousand words, a few hundred more could drive more engagement for your Instagram posts.

With a 2,200 character limit, Instagram is not a long-form channel. But what’s the sweet spot for higher engagement? 20 characters? 138-150 characters? More than 150 characters? 280 characters?

Is shorter always better?

Shorter captions used to drive more engagements. Posts with 50 characters or less got more interactions in a 2019 analysis of  5.9 million Instagram posts by Quintly.

But shorter posts worked better for Instagram users who had more followers. For accounts with:

• 1,000 followers or fewer, interactions were the same regardless of caption length. So, if you’re only starting your Instagram account, you might want to consider posting more than a few words or hashtags.
• 1,000 to 1 million followers, posts with 1 to 50 characters got the most interaction.
• 1 million to more than 10 million followers, posts with zero characters got the most interaction.

Longer captions: the new black?

Average caption length on Instagram has doubled from 2016 to 2020, according to research by Fohr.

Longer captions drive more engagements, according to a 2021 Hootsuite experiment. This doesn’t mean that you have to hit 2,200 characters. But longer captions can:

1. Deliver more valuable information. If you’re putting out educational or informational content, images might not be enough to fully get your point across.
2. Tell a story. Captions can provide more context to images, and relatable or interesting stories can help you connect more with your followers and drive them to act.
3. Start a conversation. By writing an interesting caption, you can ask your followers to share their own thoughts, tips, or insights.

Make your caption look easy to read by adding line breaks every 25 words or so.

Instagram only displays the first 125 characters of your caption. So, make sure that your first 125 characters say something that will compel readers to click “Read more.”

What’s the best instagram hashtag limit?

Hashtags allow you to reach more audiences, especially those who aren’t following you yet. Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags. But how many should you use?

That depends. Are you aiming for more reach? Or higher engagement?

• Posts with at least 9 hashtags got the highest engagement in a report by Track Maven. In another study, posts with 30 hashtags received almost twice the engagement of those with 5 or less, according to a Later analysis of 18 million IG feed posts.
• 20 hashtags is ideal for reaching more viewers, according to Later’s research. Posts with 30 hashtags got the second-highest average reach.

Bottom line: More is more. Posts with more hashtags perform better.

TIP: If you don’t want to exhaust your 2,200-character caption limit for hashtags, you can also add hashtags as comments.

How long should hashtags be?

Posts with 21-character hashtags received much more engagement, on average, compared to those with fewer or more hashtags, according to Track Maven.

What’s the best Instagram caption length for you?

Of course, different caption and hashtag lengths may perform differently for different accounts. Play around with your caption and hashtag lengths, and see what works best for your audience, brand and type of content.

_____

Sources: Benjamin Chacon, “What is the Best Instagram Caption Length?,” Later Media, Nov. 24, 2021

Stacey McLachlan, “Experiment: Do Long Captions Get More Engagement on Instagram?” Hootsuite, May 18, 2021

Monique Thomas, “The Number of Hashtags You Should Use on Instagram, According to 18M Posts,” Later Media, Nov. 12, 2021

“Instagram Study 2019: An in-depth report by Quintly,” Quintly, 2019

“The Best Hashtag Strategies for Social Media [PDF],” Track Maven, 2016

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Blog posts are supposed to be 2,000 words long! insists a participant on one of my webinars.

Excuse me, her colleague interrupts. Pillar posts should be 2,000 words long. Regular posts should be 1,750 words long.

No wonder people are so confused about blog-post length. Research (and you’ll find a collection of it below) argues persuasively that the longer the post, the higher it will rank on search engine results pages, the more readership it will get and the more likely it will be to get shared.

And it’s true. The most robust, insightful, thoroughly researched posts do tend to reap the highest rewards.

But does that mean your post should be 2,000 words long? That depends. Are you writing about rocket science? Or radicchio salad?

Sometimes short posts are best; sometimes the ideal blog post length is longer. The right word length for a blog post depends on the topic. Fortunately, there’s a cool tool that tells you the best length for a blog post on your topic.

How long should your blog post be?

The tool: SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant in Google Docs. (You’ll need a subscription to SEMRush to use it.)

In addition to offering keyword research for your topic, SEMRush Writing Assistant lets you know how long your blog post should be, based on an analysis of the top-ranked blog posts on your topic.

The best length for a blog post on “What’s the best length for a blog post?,” for instance, is 1,121 words. The tool tracks your word count and reading ease and also gives you helpful tips for improving readability.

That said, longer posts in general do tend to perform better.

Why long-form content?

Remember when the perfect article length was 300 words, 500 words, 600 words, 1,000 words long? Turns out long, in-depth blog articles showcase your expertise better, climb higher on search engine results pages, and get shared more often than shorter blog posts.

Whether you’re starting a blog or managing an established one, why write blogs that are longer?

1. Longer blog posts boost search engine optimization.

Google’s clear: Blog content length is not a ranking factor for organic search engine results pages, or SERPs. Google has also said that word count doesn’t indicate the quality of content.

Google does, however, take into consideration backlinks, social shares, social engagement and organic traffic. Longer blog posts deliver all of those metrics. As a result, longer posts rank higher on Google search engine results pages, or SERPs.

Plus, the more words you have, the more longtail keywords and phrases you can include. That increases your chances of showing up higher on search engine results pages.

So what’s the best post length for SEO?

• Blog posts that earned Top 10 spots on search results averaged more than 2,000 words, according to research by Capsicum Mediaworks. Of those top posts, the longer posts — up to more than 2,400 words — performed better in search than shorter posts.
• Longer blog posts earn higher rankings on search engine results pages, according to a study by Ahrefs.
• Hubspot’s posts of 2,100 to 2,400 words get the most organic traffic, according to HubSpot’s own analysis.
• The average word count of a Google first page result is 1,447 words, according to a Backlinko analysis.

2. Longer blog posts get more links.

Once posts land higher in search results, they get more visits. If those posts offer a great deal of value, visitors might link back to them in their own social media status updates. Those links boost SEO, which boosts visitors, which boost linkbacks.

No wonder:

• Posts averaging 1,800 words or more get the most linkbacks, according to research by Moz.
• Long blog posts get more links than short blog posts, according to a study by BuzzSumo and Brian Dean.

Call it The Circle of SEO.

3. Longer blog posts get more shares.

The more information I can use to live my life better you deliver in your blog post, the more people share it.

• Posts of 3,000 to 10,000 words get shared many times more often, especially on Facebook, according to research by Aria.
• Longer articles got shared more at one popular online journal, reports Neil Patel. Their posts with more than 1,500 words got 51% more tweets, 66% more Facebook shares and 87% more LinkedIn shares than those under 400 words.
• Patel’s own posts of more than 1,500 words receive 68% more tweets and 22% more Facebook likes than shorter pieces, he reports.

4. Longer posts get read more carefully. Or do they?

Reading may also increase with word count.

• Time spent on a blog post peaks at 7 minutes, according to Medium. So, Medium suggests, strive for 7-minute posts. How long is that? Figure 7 minutes of reading time at about 200 words per minute for about 1,400 words.
• However, the longer the page, the less of it people read, according to a study by the Nielsen Norman Group. People read about 20% of the words on the page. The longer the page, the smaller percentage of words they read. The solution: Make your long-form blog post scannable.

5. Longer blog posts boost your reputation.

“To demonstrate world-class expertise,” Jacob Nielsen writes, “avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts” clients and customers.

Want to be seen as the expert in the field? Go deep, not shallow.

What’s the best blog post length?

Whatever the best length for your blog post, don’t just write longer to reach your word count. You won’t get the results you’re looking for with 2,000 words of filler. So pack your post with great research and insight.

As author Maureen Howard said, “I like density, not volume.”

___

Sources: Brian Dean, “We Analyzed 11.8 Million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO,” BackLinko, April 28, 2020

Brian Dean, “We Analyzed 912 Million Blog Posts. Here’s What We Learned About Content Marketing,” BackLinko, Feb. 19, 2019

Kevin Espiritu, “How Important is Content Length? Why Data-Driven SEO Trumps Guru Opinions,” serpIQ, April 26, 2012

Casey Henry, “What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 1,” Moz, Oct. 19, 2009

Lindsay Kolowich, “The Character Count Guide for Blog Posts, Videos, Tweets & More,” HubSpot, Oct. 31, 2017

Quincy Larson, “How to write Medium stories people will actually read,” freeCodeCamp (a Medium publication)

Heather Lloyd-Martin, “What’s the ‘Best’ Word Count for Google? [Updated for 2019],” Success Works, Aug. 21, 2019

Paddy Moogan, “How to Generate Content Ideas Using Buzzsumo (and APIs),” Moz, June 3, 2015

Dave Nirav, “How Important is Content Length for SEO & Conversion in 2022 [Infographic],” Capsicum Mediaworks

Jakob Nielsen, “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings,” Nielsen Norman Group, July 9, 2007

Neil Patel, “How Long Should Each Blog Post Be? A Data Driven Answer,” Quick Sprout, March 31, 2014

Mike Sall, “The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes,” Medium, Dec, 2, 2013

Barry Schwartz, “Google: Word Count Is Not A Ranking Factor,” Search Engine Roundtable, Aug. 5, 2019

Matt Southern, “Google: Word Count Does Not Equal Quality Content,” Search Engine Journal, July 25, 2018

Jakob Nielsen, “How Little Do Users Read?,” Nielsen Norman Group, May 5, 2008

Neil Patel, “How Long Should Your Blog Articles Be? (With Word Counts for Every Industry)
”

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The No. 1 advice email newsletter subscribers have for e-zine senders? Keep it short.

This according to the Nielsen Norman Group’s 6 rounds of email newsletter usability studies conducted over 16 years.

People spend just 51 seconds, on average, with an email newsletter after opening it, according to an NNG study.

“The rule for web content is to keep it short,” writes Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group. “The rule for email content is to keep it ultra-short.”

Why so short?

Why do people spend so little time with email newsletters?

• Too many emails. Organizations and individuals send out 347.3 billion emails a day, according to Statista. That’s a lot of competition for attention in the inbox. (And that doesn’t include all of the email marketing pieces, blog posts and other content marketing pieces screaming for your readers’ attention.)
• Tiny screens. Around 81% of people use a mobile app to open their emails. And yet, Hubspot found that only 56% of companies have a marketing strategy to send mobile-friendly emails. That’s despite the fact that the tiny screen causes all kinds of usability problems.
• Audience and sender sophistication. As email newsletters have become shorter, more visual and more scannable, subscribers have learned to expect more tightly edited e-zines.

The result? Readers want less.

“Users basically said that newsletters are bad if they take too much time or demand too much work of the user,” Nielsen writes. “Newsletters are good if they … are quick reads that do not feel frivolous.”

So how long should email newsletters be?

How long should email newsletters be?

The short answer is, it depends.

The longer answer requires math. But stick with me. It’s worth it.

People read about 200 words per minute. So figure Average Reading Time, or A.R.T., a concept created by The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark.

To figure A.R.T., multiply the number of minutes you think people will spend reading your message by 200 words per minute. The result: your recommended word count.

We know that people will spend an average of 51 seconds — let’s call it a minute — with your email newsletter. So multiply one minute by 200 words per minute to get the recommended length of your e-zine in words.

The answer: 200 words per newsletter.

Aim for 200-word email newsletters.

This recommendation is borne out by another study.

Emails of approximately 20 lines of text or about 200 words results in the highest email click-through rate for most industries, according to a study of more than 2.1 million customers by Constant Contact. (Marketing emails click-through rate for most industries requires even fewer words.)

The Constant Contact research also showed that 3 or fewer images get the highest click-throughs.

But maybe your e-zine should be longer. Or shorter. …

The more often you send your newsletter, the shorter it should be, according to Campaigner. Keep dailies to a page or less, weeklies at 5 to 7 pages or less. Monthlies can be longer, but only if you have truly fascinating information.

Too long? Send less more often.

Or maybe it should be really, really short.

The only email newsletter with the highest open rate in an NNG study was Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day. It’s just a few lines long.

That doesn’t include the subject line, but it does include the call to action.

What’s your email marketing strategy? Would your email newsletter be twice as good if it were half as long?

___

Sources:

Rebekah Carter, “Essential Email Marketing Statistics To Strengthen Your Strategy in 2023,” Ecommerce Platforms, November 15, 2022

Mike Renahan, “The Ideal Length of a Sales Email, Based on 40 Million Emails,” HubSpot, July 11, 2018

Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

Jason Fidler, “New Data: How the Amount of Text and Images Impact Email Click-Through Rates,” Constant Contact

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