When I first joined people said that 350 - 750 words is the golden area, and will help get engagement.
A lot of my posts tend to go over this, not because I feel they have to, but mainly because I get a bit lost in what I'm writing and continue to go for it, instead of cutting it short.
I've noticed with myself though, a post I'm interested in that is 1500 words, doesn't feel long when reading it. So, I think rather than moving to short form as an evolutionary neccesity, we just need to search for content produced that entertains and interests us as consumers and hope that what we write is found by interested consumers.
Yeah I can agree. A little something for everyone. Need millions of consumers for shortform to work as well, because there are far more products competing for those eyes. Without millions looking, most of that shortform goes unnoticed. Could have 1000 short posts produced in no time but if only ten are looking, it won't succeed.
Yeah, I didn't think of that. Something like Twitter and Instagram work because of the sheer amount of content produced each day that there really is a lot to keep many people hooked and scrolling.
Like 3Speak shorts is great to have, but the reason YT shorts, TikTok, and IGs Reels work is that there is so much content to keep people on the platforms for hours a day.
I've noticed in the last nearly 2 years of being here, engagement comes from asking questions or creating some thought provoking content that gets people talking as opposed to something like a piece of fiction writing.
Something else to think about, especially when it comes to video shorts.
They get a lot of views, sure. But I noticed when I consume that content I might watch a short 2 or 3 times before moving to the next one. So I see a high view count but I wonder how many actual consumers there were.
And I'd say fiction needs a lot of words. Fiction isn't a long form blog post. Fiction can be difficult to engage with though but that doesn't make it bad. Not everyone writes a book review afterwards. They take it in and enjoy it in silence.
I really like the sort of engagement that comes from posting fiction in The Ink Well, as I've received so much great feedback over ther. They encourage posters to comment on at least two stories prior to posting one of their own which is a great way to incentivise writers to engage more. The only reason I don't post much there is because I tend to write serialised stories, rather than one-offs, so I usually stick to Scholar and Scribe for the most part.
Also, yeah, I sometimes watch shorts multiple times too before moving on. YouTube recently allowed shorts to be monetized, which is kind of cool. I used to post gameclips I'd take occasionally, and some of them got some pretty good views.
Do you think you'd ever record and edit your art sessions? I'm planning on setting up a camera next time I do some sculpting and I might do a bit of commentary over the timelapse too.
I've considered recording the process. Never thought of it as something exciting to watch. Don't know much about editing video either. Not sure if it's something I want to learn.