Putting a character limit on social posts

This Infographic shows the ideal post length for patient engagement

While Twitter is the only social network that limits character count, that doesn’t mean your hospital should post paragraphs on other social networks. For each channel, there are ideal lengths that help to capture audiences and drive engagement — before they get bored and scroll on.

The only exception to this rule is Instagram, where longer photo captions tend to perform better than those with shorter captions. A study conducted by the University of Wisconsin and Olapic suggest this is because longer captions can contain sentimental content or encourage engagement by asking questions.

For everything else, Buffer and SumAll put together an infographic that shows the ideal post length for all social media channels to drive engagement. Here are some of their findings:

• Tweets < 100 characters have a 17% higher engagement rate
• Facebook posts 40 characters or less receive 86% more engagement
• The ideal hashtag length is 6 characters
• The average length of the top 50 YouTube videos is 2 minutes and 54 seconds
• Podcasts should be 22 minutes or less
• Slideshare presentations should be 6 minutes or less

These are national standards, so if your hospital or healthcare organization has had a lot of luck with certain lengths different from the above, stick with what’s working for you. However, if you need some guidelines to refine your strategy, these are a great place to start. Remember to always be as clear and concise as possible in order to deliver your intended message.

See the rest of their findings here.