Everybody who frequently browses their Facebook and Twitter feeds has come across headlines like, “The 5 Best Beach Wedding Venues in the World” or “10 Blog Posts That Will Fire Your Creativity.” Such bulleted lists—known as “listicles”—are so ubiquitous that they have easily become one of the most insanely popular ways to package content.
Of course, not everyone is happy with this content marketing tactic. Many old school journalists consider these to be dumbed-down versions of clickbait journalism, only existing to waste readers’ time and discourage analytical thinking.
Well, these people can yap all they want, but that won’t change the fact that listicles work ridiculously well. According to Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners, all of the top ten blog posts on Econsultancy were in listicle format. Similarly, more than half of the last 50 posts on Hubspot’s blog were listicles. Buzzfeed, the current king of listicles, raked in more than 76 million unique visitors just last April, based on comScore data.
Just to drive the point home, here’s a listicle detailing the five reasons why the format should be used for content marketing:
1. Listicles give readers exactly what they want.
Listicle headlines are pretty straightforward. It shows potential readers what the content is all about, giving them an idea what to expect right away.
For instance, if a person is looking for productivity tips, he’ll click on something like, “The Top 10 Ways to Stay Productive” because those practical and actionable tips are exactly what he is looking for. He’ll have no business skimming a listicle called, “32 of the Cutest Puppy Pictures You Have Ever Seen” because the title says it all—there are no productivity tips here, just cute dog pictures.
Listicles also automatically curate content. Why would someone visit 15 separate websites to look for various cheesecake recipes if they can be found in one listicle?
Forbes’ Steve Denning says it all: “The listicle helps us to judge the ideas. Are these concepts cliché? Do I really want to spend time reading further? If not, get me out of here!”
2. Listicles fit right into humans’ short attention span.
It’s sad but true: People nowadays have short attention spans. The average attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2015—even shorter than a goldfish’s nine seconds.
It doesn’t help that there is a huge volume of content to be consumed on the web. According to Firebrand Group’s Luke Robbins, an average reader skims through more than 30 articles in just a couple of hours.
With time being a hindrance, numbered headlines signal to the reader how much time he should spend reading each listicle. “Unless the reader is specifically looking for the topic discussed within an article of significant length, it is very unlikely that they will stick around to find out if it’s good enough to spend the time to read it,” Robbins said.
3. Listicles appeal to the brain.
The brain tends to recognize patterns, and the predictable structure of listicles makes them easy to understand and digest. Furthermore, completing each point in the list feels like accomplishing a milestone, making readers more compelled to finish the list.
Without fancy rhetoric and highfalutin terminologies, listicles require very little concentration and analysis. They can be skimmed easily without missing out on all the key points. Even passive readers can take in information without breaking a sweat, signaling a much smaller workload for the brain than, say, a long-form article from The New Yorker.
Speaking of The New Yorker, one article pretty much provided all the reasons why listicles are psychologically attractive: “The headline catches our eye in a stream of content; it positions its subject within a preexisting category and classification system, like ‘talented animals’; it spatially organizes the information; and it promises a story that’s finite, whose length has been quantified upfront.”
4. Listicles provide great traffic and low bounce rate.
Since listicles are psychologically attractive and the topics are easily relatable, it is not surprising that readers love sharing them to their social media followers. Because of this, they easily reach loads of potential readers and generate a lot of traffic for the website.
The structure of listicles also provides a low bounce rate, defined as the percentage of readers who enter the site and leave after viewing only one page. Readers have to stay on the page and scroll all the way down if they want to read the full listicle. By securing the reader for the whole article, instead of simply skimming the headline, bounce rates drop significantly.
5. Listicles are quick and easy to create.
Ask any marketer, blogger, or content manager and they will say that listicles are definitely easier to write than regular articles. After all, it follows a template that only consists of an introduction, several bullet points, and a conclusion. It doesn’t need a narrative or even a clear thesis or argument to work. Like what Steven Poole of The Guardian wrote, “I just have to think of each bit, and am blessedly free of the obligations to arrange them in a convincing sequence and deploy all the logical glue that sticks them together.”
This is also the reason why listicles are branded as lazy journalism. But it doesn’t have to be, as long as it is fact-checked and delivers value to the reader. There are even ones that truly deliver compelling content, serving as jump-off points for more in-depth reporting.
“A long-form article will take you through one topic in considerable depth; a list, compiled thoughtfully, will skim the surface of a broader body of content, giving you a series of contact points from which to explore further in your own time,” wrote Rachel Edidin from Wired.com.
Listicles may be criticized by many, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are a very effective style of content marketing. One can either embrace it or disregard it. Want to craft practical, quick, well-structured, and fun content that has the potential to go viral? Create a listicle.
Just don’t expect a Pulitzer.
This article was co-written by ArticleBunny
The post 5 Reasons Why Listicles Rock for Content Marketing appeared first on ArticleBunny Blog.