According to Facebook, its users are now spending less than two seconds on any individual post on their site on mobile, and a fraction over that on desktop. The implications are clear: attention spans are getting smaller, and the younger generations even more so.
So what are businesses to do when that content takes money and time to create? Well, as it turns out that brand recall is more important than the content, and video marketing doesn’t even need two seconds to give you huge results there.
What it does mean in terms of other content is that you are going to have to work smarter. Creating relevant, even useful content and ads is more important than just straightforward information dumps as were once popular. People like to buy from who they know and trust, and being useful is one easy way to quickly ramp this up.
Secondly – and this is important if you plan on selling online or already do – you need to speed up and optimize your shopping cart experience. We’ve all had a bad one, and we’ve all just dumped a cart as a result. Keep things swift and focused on value and faster load times.
But perhaps one of the best ways to confront this lack of attention span is to go straight to what many people are rightly or wrongly calling the source of dwindling attention spans: social media. These huge platforms specialize in bite-size content, and it’s easy to make yourself visible to millions of highly targeted people on them.
In the end, if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them!