Marketing and Social Media

After decades of writing online I'm still pretty stubborn about what I think is right, despite all evidence to the contrary.  It's time to acknowledge that there is a lot of great information out there, and I should stop reinventing the wheel, especially if I'm going to do it badly.

• The answer to "how long should my blog post (tweet, FB post, etc.) be?" is, of course, "it depends".  But the folks at bufferapp.com are not afraid to draw a line in the sand.  https://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-length-social-media
• 40 characters - characters! not words! - for a Facebook post.  No surprise that I'm too wordy there.
• 55 characters for a title
• 6 words for a blog headline
• 1600 words for a blog post; advice is to start there as your average, and after writing some posts, run the data on your own site to see whether shorter or longer is working

• Why you should focus on blog readership rather than traffic
• Less than half of people read past the first 100 words; rather than fight it, use those words to make sure they know if it's what they want to read or not; oddly, they will still share it
•  The first sentence of every paragraph has the idea in it; then people know whether to read the whole paragraph or not
• The conclusion should be first; what is this "inverted pyramid style familiar to journalists"?  Need to research
• 80% of reader's time is above the fold
• People actually want outbound links