How social (media savvy) are you?

By Leticia Madrigal | Social Media Specialist

Social media is currently the largest platform to reach an audience as a business. But how successful are businesses while doing so?

The largest social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are heavily congested with organizations trying to reach their audience.  Many of these know exactly how to do it with huge teams working on content – and others find themselves struggling.        

Though reaching an audience on social media appears to be the easiest and cheapest route. The reality is different.  This is due to the decrease of the organic reach on platforms and as the current average attention span of an individual.  The average attention span of an individual is said to be less than that of a goldfish. A goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds. According to Microsoft, an average individual has the attention span of 8.5 seconds.

Although the current generation is said to have their phone in-hands at all times, what they’ll stop and actually read is selective.  This all means that it takes about eight seconds for an individual to decide if they are interested in the subject or not.  How much time is actually eight seconds? That can range between 2-4 sentences depending on the word length and the speed of the reader.

So if the average attention span of an individual is 8.5 seconds and what they are actually reading is selective.  Then, social media marketers are left having to create a message with 8.5 seconds or at least be interesting enough to create the engagement past those seconds.

Different ways that social media marketers are doing so are by: creating shorter captions, adding interesting images to each post—gifs and small clips are popular—and creating content that adds to current pop culture conversations. 

Always be in the know and if it fits within your audience, join the conversation.