Abstract
Do short posts draw more engagement on social media than long ones? I examine this using 856,220 Facebook posts by 112 party and 74 party leader pages in 20 European countries, 2010 to 2020, collected through CrowdTangle. The median post had 85 characters of text in 2010 and 252 in 2020. Comparing posts by the same page, of the same type, with other posts in the same country and month, from June 2015 onwards, posts with no text drew about 42% fewer interactions than posts of 101 to 200 characters, also when content passed on from other pages is excluded. Among posts with text, engagement was U-shaped but mostly flat: very short posts (1 to 50 characters) drew about 11% more interactions and the longest (more than 800) about 20% more. The longest posts drew about 58% more shares, 35% more comments and 15% more likes and reactions. Length went with more engagement mainly for text-only posts. The association was steeper before 2015 than after, but this coincides with a break in data capture. Pages that wrote longer posts on average did not draw more engagement. These are associations: pages choose how much to write. Whether a post had text went with larger differences than how long the text was.
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Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Less Is More? Post Length and Engagement on the Facebook Pages of European Parties and Leaders, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23418597