Aw, my title gave away the punch line...well maybe. If you recall my post about baiting a writer's pen last week, I'd asked you how many tips you prefer to read when reading an article that included tips.
Helped by Caitlin Hinrichs here at SocialMediatoday.com I'd asked readers questions in an unscientific poll - We had 59 respondents take the poll and they gave the following answers:
Do you prefer an odd number or even number of tips when someone publishes a post?
Odd Number - 66.1%
Even number - 37.3%
Do you prefer a small number of tips or the largest number of tips you can think of?
Small number - 79.7%
Large number - 20.3%
Please select your preference for the number of tips you prefer to read in a post.
1-5 33.9%
6-10 49.2%
11-20 6.8%
21-50 8.5%
51-100 0.0%
More than 100 1.7%
Unfortunately 59 respondents means our margin of error is quite big, but if we ignore the science my advice to you when deciding how much bait you need is to pick a small number of tips, the tips be odd numbered, and readers will prefer that your provide 6 and10 tips. As 6 to 10 tips only leaves either two odd numbers, 7 or 9, you should give either 7 or 9 tips.
Chatting with Brenda Somich, the moderator for Social Media Today, she told me these results reflect her experience in running the website.
Brenda said, "I've been moderating Social Media Today for the last 6 months and according to what I've seen, the poll results (in general) do correlate closely to what posts perform best within the SMT community. We get a balanced amount of even and odd numbered tips in our posts, but the majority of content that performs well are posts with smaller, more elaborate tips in the under 10 range. Although numbers in the title do help prepare the reader ahead of time, I would say that quality definitely trumps quantity when it comes to giving advice online and that people are more likely to share a post that offers sound advice rather than a straightforward list with little to no depth."
I also asked two open questions. The first question I asked, was about why the number of tips is important when you see a headline?
Already applying what we've learned, I thought I'd write 7 tips to provide a synopsis of the answers:
1. Too many tips may mean less careful thought by the author; the writer hasn't taken the time to prioritize all of the tips. People believed that fewer tips meant that the tips will be more useful.
2. Readers are busy. Lots of tips meant it takes too long to read.
3. People have problems processing data. Lots of tips meant it is tough to process tips and remember them all.
4. Lots of tips meant there was too much effort involved in reading the post. Visitors might open a long list of tips, read a portion intending to return but never do.
5. Those people who liked lots of tips were not worried about reading irrelevant tips; they believed they would skim to those tips that were new to them.
6. The number of tips in a headline helped people gauge whether they wanted to read the post.
7. Lastly, I really thought this point from one respondent was valuable, "Depends on the question. If it is about planning then I prefer less. If it is about technical specifics, how to then with different ways to grow your twitter following for example, then the greater the number the better."
The second question I asked was; will the number of tips make it more likely that you will share or bookmark a post, if so how many and why?
Some readers said yes the number of tips did make a difference. And here we had some people preferring to read lots of tips. "Big numbers are cool. I remember reposting a huge Mashable list simply because it was so large." and some readers wanting a small number, "in respect of my followers time, I would probably only share a post with 5 tips, and only if they were new and interesting."
Quality rather than quantity was stated as an important factor by a number of respondents and echo's Brenda's comments.
My thanks to Caitlin Hinrichs in help with the preparation of this post!