There has been much debate about the length of content and what performs well in terms of SEO, engagement and social sharing. Readers want short, snappy content, ideally under 140 characters or at most a list, right? Well, actually, wrong. The evidence of 7 recent studies is that long form content is alive, thriving and driving high levels of content performance.

Seven Recent Articles and Studies on Long Form Content

I have summarized below the findings of the following seven articles on long form content:

NewsWhip study – Long form posts are the most shared publisher stories

NewsWhip’s study found that long form articles and posts do very well on the social web, despite increasingly being accessed from mobile devices. People seem happy to read long articles on their phones.

NewsWhip picked the top 10 most-shared stories on Facebook for a range of publishers during November 2013. As you can see below, the average word counts were 1,000 words or more. The BBC site being the main exception.