Last week we began our series on tips for engaging content with a call to brevity, and today we're taking our own advise and giving you a real short tip.
Practice Incompleteness
This sounds bad, but it is a good thing for engagement. Note that this post is one part of a larger series. When I was a novice blogger, I would try to write comprehensively and leave no stone unturned. While unique visits were high, I noticed that after about 15 seconds readers and viewers dropped off and no one commented other than spammers. So I started serializing my longer ideas. Not only did unique views go up dramatically, so did time spent consuming content, comments, sharing, likes… every type of engagement you look for.
An added plus was the comments often made me change direction, add insight and rethink my positions. That increased my reputation as a fair-minded source of information and analysis.
When you are exploring concepts that might be new, reading the signs for a trail can come from many directions.