Creating Effective Content For Shrinking Attention Spans

Hello, fellow goldfish.

The idea that our attention spans are increasingly shrinking is one we hear all the time. Blame it on the mobile revolution, but we can guarantee that you have likely questioned the state of your attention span at some point.

While you might have thought you would fare better than a goldfish, a 2015 Microsoft study found otherwise. That’s right: the headline, ‘Goldfish Outperforms Humans in Attention Span Department’ was big news.

If you missed the news (blame it on your attention span), the study concluded that the average attention span of the goldfish is 9 seconds while humans averaged 8.5 seconds.

Armed with this data, it becomes clear that businesses and marketers have to fight harder than ever before to get their content seen and heard. Not only are they up against seemingly infinite streams of blog posts, but now they have to add shrinking attention spans to the mix, too.

Here are actionable steps you can take right now to create the most effective content for shrinking attention spans.

1. An Eye-Catching Headline (and Useful Content)

With our increasingly shrinking attention spans, we need to create eye-catching headlines that demand immediate attention. There is a lot that goes into creating a headline, perhaps even more than you realized.

But above all, make your headline useful; whether you offer tips, tricks or secrets, if you can provide value in your headline, you will get clicks. That goes for the rest of your content, too. For more on the topic of effective headlines, click here.

Pro Tip: Know your audience well. What keywords are visitors using to find your blog posts? What questions are they asking at the end of your blogs? Use this information to create new blog posts; give them what they want.

2. Start Out with A Bang: Make it Personal or Be Funny

You need to come out with a bang in each and every blog post. How? By connecting with your audience. Tell a brief story or make it personal in some way. Add a bit of personality; crack a joke.

If you can get away with less of a stiff tone, you will also connect with your readers by showing yourself to be relatable. Here’s a  look at how to make your copy more engaging.

If you can do any of these things, especially at the beginning of a new blog post or article, you will hook your readers and keep them engaged throughout the entire piece. Keep this momentum going throughout the article for maximum effect.

3. Make Your Content Digestible

Just because our attention spans are shrinking, doesn’t mean you have to create goldfish-approved content that isn’t longer than 9 seconds.

If you did that, you would be making a mistake, as you will see. In fact, your content strategy should include a mixture of both short-form and long-form content.

The key is to make longer content more digestible and/or easily scannable. Consider that 43% of Internet users skim blog posts and you begin to see why. 

Let’s go back to why your content strategy should still include longer content, in spite of the current research on our attention spans.

Research from Pew shows that while shorter content is more common and receives more traffic, people read long-form content nearly just as much as they read short-form content. It also gets more shares. You just have to make the content scannable.

Ultimately, when a visitor lands on your page, they want the answer to their question solved as quickly as possible. If they don’t find it easily and quickly, they are going to leave.

Provide fast answers by making your content easily digestible and scannable. This is the key to a positive user experience. You can do that with:

• Bold headings (ensure that you keep font and size consistent throughout the article)
• Short introductions – get to your point quickly
• Short paragraphs, ideally no longer than three lines of text, just like what you see in this very article.
• Bold important pieces of text
• Include bullet points and/or numbered lists
• Have a conclusion that summarizes the content of the article
• Quick loading time; a slow loading page is bad for both conversions and your Google rankings. Here are some tips for speeding up your website.

4. Include Visual Elements

Whether you use high-quality images like screenshots or infographics, every piece of content that you produce should include visual elements. Images shouldn’t just be added for the sake of it, but rather, to enhance the content in some way.

Infographics are particularly great because they are a compelling way to present data while also being memorable.

Having a Google-optimized mini website can alse be a great way to add a visual element to your business.

5. Interactivity

The question has always been how to create engaging content, but in today’s landscape with so many things vying for our attention at once, and perhaps because of our limited attention spans, the need to keep readers engaged becomes even more of a pressing concern.

One answer to the question is to use interactive content, which is a highly engaging form of content because it involves the user in a personalized way.

Interactive content is on the rise. 75% of marketers have plans to increase their output.

Interactive content takes a variety of forms, from trivia to polls and surveys. Here is a list of all of the different types of interactive content you can produce. Buzzfeed is definitely the King/Queen of interactive content.

Are you getting overwhelmed yet? Stick with us almost there!

6. Diversify Your Content

Content is quickly diversifying and it looks like video is increasingly leading the way. Video: yet another highly engaging content form.

Have you thought about creating different types of content other than your standard blog posts? While blog posts certainly have their place, it is always a good idea to appeal to a wide range of audience tastes.

According to YouTube, almost a third of the people on the Internet watch YouTube videos, and they spend hundreds of millions of hours watching these videos every single day.

Live video is also receiving more and more attention (cue Facebook Live) and is also relatively cheap and quick to produce.

Live video is a great tool for businesses to connect with their customers in a structured way, all while doing so in real-time, which boosts engagement.

Businesses can conduct customer service, answer FAQs and accomplish a number of other great outcomes for their business. Here is a look at all of the ways businesses can use Facebook Live.

Have you considered producing a podcast? It’s a great way to interact with your audience while on-the-go.

7. Design Elements

You’ve got the headline. You’ve formatted it with headings and bolded relevant sections. Perhaps you’ve even included an infographic. All that is left to do is to think about the design elements. Here’s quick checklist to make your content as effective as possible:

• Use easy-to-read fonts
• Add more whitespace by adjusting your margins; this minimizes clutter and distractions (by the way, avoid flashy pop-ups on the side if possible)
• Add tweetables; these are important sentences/quotes that generate a tweet once you click on them; they are engaging while also serving as calls-to-action in your blog post. This article will show you how to create tweetables.

Are you with us, fellow goldfish? ….

Thought so. In wrapping all of this up, hook your readers with an engaging headline and an entertaining first few sentences. Make your content digestible, include visual and interactive elements and ensure that you’ve nailed the design element.

If you do that, your content will be maximized for our ever-decreasing attention spans.