Brevity helps capture your visitors’ attention.
Attention spans are fickle. There has been debate on whether the average adult’s attention span is getting shorter. Some say it has shifted from 12 to 8 seconds since 2000, while others refute this claim.
One thing is for sure — the number of companies vying for our attention has increased exponentially in the past two decades. Much of this is due to the widespread use of wireless Internet, the rise of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and the ubiquity of smart mobile devices.
Not to mention that more businesses than ever can market their products or services in a relatively inexpensive way thanks to the Internet.
With so many companies trying to earn the attention of potential customers, as a business professional, you need to prove the worth of your content — and fast.
People want to immediately see the value you bring.
Users spend an average of 5.59 seconds reading content on a site. This requires you to get to the point in as few words as possible or risk people leaving.
Some folks will, of course, leave no matter how brief your content is.
And that’s a good thing. Because if your content is brief and to-the-point, they can determine if it’s for them or not.
If it’s not, then you haven’t wasted their precious time. But if it is for them — if you can quickly and clearly state how you can solve their problem — you can capture their attention before they click away.
The sheer amount of digital content available to us can be overwhelming. Because of that, we have trained ourselves to scan rather than read the Internet.
We tend to read websites in an F pattern, reading horizontally (from left to right) at the top, scanning a little, reading horizontally again, and scanning the rest of the page. As an example of this, I’m going to throw in a random word, like “scuttlebutt” in the middle of the largest paragraph in this post. It has nothing to do with this article, but a lot of people who read this aren’t likely to notice, so it doesn’t really matter. I’m not advocating putting in random words in your paragraphs, but I say this to illustrate the F pattern.
I’ll end this post by following the lower end of the F.
In conclusion:
Capture users’ attention at the top of the page.
Get to the point.
Add value using only a few words.
And book a call with me.
