Digital content is a complex and ever-changing field and it’s hard to keep up with online tastes and behaviour. But stepping back a bit, there are five drivers of engagement that are fundamental and which, in my experience, are something of a blindspot for many organisations:

1. Users want to get things done. They are intolerant of organisations who don’t frame their content accordingly.
2. The web is noisy: Impatience is a virtue online, so you need to make a good first impression if you want to stop users from scrolling on by.
3. ‘Skimmability’: People don’t read, they scan. Structure your content to recognise this. 
4. Relatability: People make snap judgments about your intent, they scrutinise your digital body language for signals of trustworthiness, and are super-sensitive to signs you will waste their time.
5. Mobile-centricity: You produce mostly on desktops but your users are mostly on mobiles – that’s a complication that can’t be ignored.  

For many, these will seem obvious. Just think about your own use of the Web. But I know from first-hand experience that they are all too easily forgotten under the stresses of creating content. And that includes by many of the world’s top digital publishers. 

1. Users Want Help Getting Things Done 

The openness of web technology meant that individuals and organisations got access as early as their organisations and, this is crucial, individuals have generally worked out how to get what they need better than their employers. 

What the data says

There’s no unified dataset for global internet usage, but the following gives a flavour of what an average person does each day:

• Emails: 121 sent/received (Radicati Group) 
• Texts: 50 sent/received for WhatsApp users (Whats The Big Data)
• Google searches: 3+ (Moz)
• Social Media usage: 2.5 hours  (Statista)

With all this online activity, most people have acquired new skills. One of the least-discussed is the ability to write informally. When I was young, the only audience for my writing was teachers and college professors. Now pretty much everyone knows how to communicate effectively over text. The huge implication of this is that teams who produce content with a formal tone are increasingly viewed as out of touch. 

The general public has also worked out how to filter things of interest from the streams of content in their inboxes and social networks. In this new world, subject lines and social posts have to ‘pop’ if they are to be noticed.

And by now, ‘googling’ has become pervasive, but users only notice you if you get into the top 10 results. 

The net result of all this is not only that digital media expertise is extremely widely distributed, but also that it is obvious to users when an organisation hasn’t quite got it. The big risk is of being deemed irrelevant.

The user-first content checklist

• Be helpful: Offer something of value to the reader/viewer before selling your org.
• Strike the right tone: Write as informally as you can, and minimise jargon.
• Speak to the reader: Have in mind someone you know and think what they’d find interesting.
• Park your organisational hat and think about how you use the Web – what do you find offputting? What makes things pop for you?

2. You’ve Got Mere Seconds to Hook Busy User’s Attention 

There is so much content around that users have had to develop efficient ways of parsing it. 

This generally happens in the form of scrolling through streams, whether it’s in email inboxes, social network feeds, search results pages, or conversations on instant messaging platforms.

What the data says

You get shockingly little time to stop them scrolling past with your subject line, social post, or meta description.

• Web page: 0.2 seconds
• Social post: 2.5 seconds, 1.7 on mobile!
• Google Results Page: 8-9 seconds
• Social video: 3 seconds (based on the minimum time required for Facebook to count a video view)

This is why high-performing content teams spend disproportionate amounts of time workshopping and testing newsletter subject lines, post headlines, YouTube thumbnails, the opening frame of their videos, and SEO summary text for web posts.

The attention-deficit-slaying checklist

• Start thinking in terms of ‘hooks’ – what few words will speak to the needs of users and rapidly capture their interest? 
• Build hooks into everything you produce – the headlines, subheadings and SEO summaries of your blog posts, the subject lines of newsletters, your social posts, and your videos.
• Make your social posts ‘pop’ by making your blurbs as short and relatable as possible, avoid stock photos if at all possible, and use styling (line breaks, emojis, lists) to create an eye-catching layout.
• Sell your story in your video’s opening frame: You need a strong caption to hook the user and this aspect deserves as much TLC as social posts, headlines and metadata.
• YouTube thumbnails: Take your cue from super-user Mr Beast (who employs a full-time team to produce thumbnails) and devote quality time to crafting what are in effect ads for your content.

3. People don’t read, they skim

This aspect of online behaviour is perhaps the hardest to understand. From my work with organisations I’d say that the assumption is that readers read every word from the headline down until they lose interest. But eye-tracking studies reveal that that is very much a minority approach. 

What the data says

These are the four most common patterns of scanning: 

Committed is perhaps how you think you read online but only 16% of users behave like this, according to usability experts Nielsen Norman. The likelihood is that you actually use something like the F Pattern, which is the most common form of scanning.

The Beauty is Only Skim-Deep Checklist

• Put clarity above cleverness: Witty headlines and subheadings might be satisfying to write but they are useless to skimmers who need self-explanatory guides to your content.
• Layout: There is nothing more offputting to a skimmer than a wall of unbroken text, particularly on mobile. Keep paragraphs short and use subheadings in blogs, add line breaks and lists to social posts. 
• Use bold text to emphasise the keywords in your content. This works particularly well at the beginning of paragraphs and is very effective for newsletters.

More advice on skimming

4. Users make snap judgements about your online persona

Busy users hate time-wasters, are wary of the heavy sell, and have learned to make rapid assessments of your intent. First impressions are super-important. 

Our visual-focused brains take less than 1/10th of a second to establish whether someone is trustworthy. It is even faster online. Readers instinctively ask these kind of questions:

• Can I trust these people?
• Am I being sold something?
• Is this my kind of place?
• Will I be wasting my time?

What the data says

A Nielsen Norman study found that making content more casual, conversational and enthusiastic had a measurable impact on user perceptions of trustworthiness. However, the use of humour was problematic, with a high risk of appearing ‘corny’.

A Stanford survey showed that the ‘Design look’ and ‘Information Design/Structure’ were the two most important factors in determining a website’s credibility. 

The Digital Body Language Checklist: 

• Tone of voice: Try to be as conversational as possible. Read your text out loud and if you stumble rewrite. Be careful with humour.
• Avoid spelling and grammatical mistakes: They’re often what give away online fraudsters and are a warning sign of poor production values. A reader will be asking themselves, ‘If they can’t be bothered to take this seriously, why should I?”
• Use plain English – you’re not trying to look clever, you’re trying to look interesting.
• Be visually creative: Stock photos are now so pervasive they can look dull. Invest some time in making your images captivating. Don’t be afraid to use simple charts and tables, which signal that you understand the importance of structure.
• Think hard about website navigation: The items on your nav bar tell a visitor what you think is most important. If it’s all about you, rather than how you can help, you risk being viewed as salesy and self-centred rather than trustworthy and useful.  
• Forsake complex site design: Users crave simplicity. An easy-to-use site with an obvious structure is by far the most favoured approach. Bear this in mind when you next update the website.

5. Producers work on laptops, the audience is on their mobiles

The mobile-centricity of the Web is easy to forget when you are creating on a desktop. To state the obvious, content optimised for mobile needs to be simpler. 

Think of your own reactions when you’ve clicked on a link, waited an age for the page to download, and been confronted by a screen of unbroken text. 

There’s another reason why mobile usability needs to be front and centre: Google evaluates sites on their mobile rather than desktop versions. 

What the data says

• Mobile usage is now nearly 60% of total online traffic
• It accounts for 80% of social media usage. 
• Irritation about slow-loading sites is widespread. Google Consumer Insights found that 53% of site visits were abandoned if a mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to download.  
• Users are less patient and expect mobile page speeds to be faster than desktop. But the reverse is true – 8.6 seconds vs 2.5, according to a study of 100 top websites. 
• Mobile is the most popular device for online video in the US, accounts for 63% of YouTube viewing, most viewers watch with the sound off (Verizon Media says 69%) and are 80% more likely to complete a captioned video than one without captions.

The mobile usability checklist

• Site speed: While it’s a structural factor beyond the control of most content producers, you can check the speed of individual pages at PageSpeed Insights, which provides suggestions on how to improve that can be passed to your dev team.
• Images: Many sites still suffer unnecessary download delays due to the use of very large image files. The average website page ‘weighs’ 2.2 Mb on mobile, of which more than a third is down to imagers. Many content management systems automatically resize images but not all. Here’s how to check image weight plus a guide to compression tools. The best idea is to make images as light as possible without distorting them.  
• Readability: Users appear to be less tolerant of wordiness and unbroken text than desktop users. Run your text through a readability app like Hemmingway (or ask your AI copilot to make it more readable)
• Take care with PDFs – they are a nightmare to read on mobiles, so link to a mobile-optimised summary page instead. 
• Social videos: Use captions, script tightly and edit carefully to maximise interestingness.