It is often said attention spans are shorter and shorter, people can’t focus and are always on the go, much like the hare from the old children’s story we all know, The Tortoise and the Hare. While many people do enjoy sharing quick things like funny animal videos or a list of top 10 vacation spots, content marketing platform Buzzsumo discovered after analyzing 100 million articles that people enjoying and sharing long form content (the tortoise of the content industry) is on the rise.
What is long form content?
Long form content is typically 1,200 words or longer and can include things like research articles or eBooks. The topics of which are meant to engage and challenge the reader. Since long form content and inbound marketing both focus on creating content that really engages a very targeted audience, the two things go hand in hand.
Here are 3 reasons long form content is an excellent addition to your inbound marketing strategy
Reason 1 | Builds trust with your audience
Generally more time, effort and research goes into writing a 1,200 word article than a 300 word article. But is taking this extra time and effort really beneficial? The answer is yes!
Using content to show your expertise about a particular topic can help create a relationship with your audience, build trust and establish you as a valuable source of information that’s important to them. If the audience is engaged, they will be compelled to investigate more of your content and ideally this exploration turns them into a lead and/or customer.
Reason 2 | Long form content is more likely to be shared
The sense of trust between the author and audience is one of the reasons why long form content is more likely to be shared than shorter content. If the audience is impressed by the content, they will be motivated to share the article with friends and colleagues who they think will also enjoy it and/or see value in it.
In a eight month long study Buzzsumo analyzed social share counts of over 100 million articles. The length of these articles ran the gamut in terms of word count. The study found that articles containing 3000 to 10,000 words were shared 8,859 times, many of these shares coming from Facebook and Twitter.
Make it easy for readers to share your content with their friends and family by providing them with a place where they can email the content to a friend or share it on social media.
Reason 3 | More content, better SEO
Since long form content has more words (slow and steady), it creates more opportunities to match search terms, both targeted short-tail and long-tail, for users of search engines.
Because you’ve built trust by providing well researched and thoughtful content, it increases the likelihood your content will be linked to from other sites. Besides the additional traffic those links create, they can also have a positive impact on your search engine rankings.
For more helpful content writing and blogging tips, download our eBook!
The turtle at the top of this page is our mashup of awesome original artwork by Isabel Foo (turtle), and Jeremy J Bristol (stack of books) from the Noun Project.
