Are you hiding behind this content debate?

We’re on Day 2 of our visibility challenge, and hopefully you’re starting to feel a little more comfortable about communicating with your Right Person, and with the idea that communicating with them regularly is a service, and not an annoyance.

Still, you might be feeling overwhelmed about creating content for your audience every single day. That’s why today, we want to talk about long-form content versus short-form content—and some of the issues that this discussion may be hiding.

Plenty of very confident marketing pros have very specific ideas about what you need to do for maximum engagement. The truth of the matter: there is no magical word count that’s guaranteed to work for every audience. The better question to ask is: who is your Right Person? If you’re serving busy moms who are sneaking a social media break in their 30-second bathroom break, you’re better off with a quick quote and an eye-catching graphic on Instagram. Is your Right Person a lifelong learner with an impressive collection of coursework who wants to know every bit of minutiae on the topics that interest them? They’re going to appreciate a deep dive that spares no detail.

Sure, there are ways to game Facebook’s algorithm, though it seems to change every few days (Do a long text post with an image! No, a short post with a link! Wait, no, do a mid-range post with a link in the comments?). Our suggestion? Mix it up—you can post almost-identical content in each format on successive days to stretch those ideas as long as possible and test what in the world Facebook wants this week.

The problem is, sometimes we get caught up on the idea of creating content with lots and lots of value, and end up…creating nothing at all. In fact, this idea that every blog post should be a fully researched thesis can become an excuse.

“Well, I’m on deadline this week, so I don’t have time to create new content.”

“I still need to do more research before I share this, so I’ll just hold off.”

“I don’t want to post about this until I’ve had time to cross-reference these five things.”

We definitely don’t recommend sharing something without checking your facts, but what if you let yourself share a chapter before you’ve written the entire novel? Instead of your “Top 50 Ways to Reinvent Yourself This Year,” how about just…one way at a time? It’ll be easier and less overwhelming for your readers to digest and implement, while giving you the opportunity to share just a bit at a time (rather than blocking out an entire week to write your weekly blog post).

Remember—done is better than perfect. (We know, recovering perfectionists, we hear you.) So rather than overthinking it, why not just…put something out there. Connect. Again. You can do this.

If you could use some help getting ahead of your content creation, we help with that—both strategy and creation. Just shoot us a message and let us know if you need help. We’re offering our content strategy services at a discounted rate this week to support our visibility challenge.