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PROFESSIONAL SERVICES BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING INSIGHTS

| 1 minute read

If Neil Patel told you to jump off the bridge with 200 words, would you do it?

I enjoyed this post by Jason Quey which echoes many of my own feelings. Clients are often asking us for tips to create the optimal Passle post - how long? how short? what title? and so forth.

The answer of course is that it's going to be different depending on your followers. To take two of our clients, what works for the FinTech Collective (short summaries of breaking news), isn't the same as what is going to work for elXtr (considered yet snappy investigations). Read both and you'll see considerable differences in tone, style, length - which is at it should be!

What we can do is tell you what has worked across the network in general, which I did here.

You can use this as a starting point, if helpful, but the great thing about creating content easily is that you can get better at creating content that works for your audience. Get started, that's the hardest thing, and look back later to see which of your posts worked best. 

Chances are, the number of words had nothing to do with the success of your best performing posts. What made them successful were that they were useful, entertaining, or just  the right thing at the right time for your audience.

That's less satisfying than aiming for 222 words with each post, I know, but it's more honest.

When Buzzsumo discovered that more words per post leads to more shares, people forgot one simple fact: Correlation does not equal causation. “The problem is when people try to reverse engineer ‘virality’ or ‘popularity’ based on meaningless variables instead of just writing something really really good.” It’s like everyone who thinks that if they start waking up at 6am they’ll magically become Elon Musk. @nateliason If Neil Patel finds out that the optimal time to share on Twitter is 2pm, that doesn’t mean you should jump off the bridge either.

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Tags

content, content marketing, passle, writing tips, fintech collective, elxtr