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Comment by mcaserta | Hacker News Reader

Hey Sean. This is pretty interesting. My only concern would be that longer articles could be more difficult to "digest" for the reader and therefore less engaging. I would expect a viral professional article to need to be long and a viral casual article to need to be shorter. Is that something you have ever researched ?

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Sharing something doesn't mean people have read it in full. :) I know I sometimes start reading an article, "get where it's going" and pass it on.

More often than not, sharing long article is a form of self-praise (for me). I feel very pleased with myself sharing a piece from Aeon on Facebook, amidst cats and babies and other stuff: "Look at me, I'm deep and I'm making Facebook a smarter place".

So, it makes total sense that long read gets more shares per view, but it doesn't necessarily mean deeper "engagement".

I have not researched that specifically, but the team at BuzzSumo analyzed 120 million articles and found a similar result. They found the optimal length for an article on Facebook to be 2000-2500 words and on LinkedIn to be 3500-4000.

So what you suggest could be true, the length of an article that does well on Facebook is shorter than LinkedIn and I'd argue that an article on Facebook is likely for a more casual reader than on LinkedIn.

However, even 2000 words is a fairly long article. They also found that articles under 500 words perform the worst.

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