Maybe being wordy in business blogs isn't such a bad thing after all.
The Average Blog Post
Imagine this: you open a blog post only to find a dense block of text.
If you’re anything like the average reader, you would probably want to click away. Or, maybe, you would want to keep reading.
When writing business blogs, remember that they are used to “disseminate information and increase the visibility of a brand online.” Michelle Charello, author of Essentials of Social Media Marketing, recommends that the reading difficulty of a blog post should be between an 8th and 9th grade level, which would be between 60.0 and 70.0 on the Flesch reading ease test.
A Flesch readability score between 30 and 50, would be considered “difficult to read.” If the blog post scored above 50, the post is easier to read, and below 30 is harder to read.
I looked at the top U.S. publishers’ business blog posts and pulled the most recent 6 blog posts from each of the top five publishing companies (Penguin/Random House, Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan). Here are the results of the Flesch reading score calculations:
Mean Score | 49.24 |
Median Score | 50.91 |
Highest Score | 72.27 |
Lowest Score | 18.39 |
So, despite the recommended practices, the trend among the top U.S. publishers is to write higher-level blog posts. Why?
There could be a few different reasons why publishing companies write higher-level blog posts. Maybe the audience is used to reading, making it easier for them to read at a higher level. Or, maybe the authors themselves are well-read and are more likely to write at a higher level. My analysis didn’t assess whether higher scores correlated with engagement, so additional research is needed to determine whether the publishers’ strategy effectively drives engagement.
Conclusion
In conclusion, your success with writing business blogs is dependent on your audience. If you’re wanting to catch a wide variety of readers, sources suggest that you should aim your readability score around 60 or higher. If you're content with targeting the current readers of publishers’ blog posts, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a lower (thereby more difficult) reading score.
It turns out the wordy blog posts may be, in fact, for the win—at least for publishers.
To test the readability of your text, paste your text into the readability calculator here. And, if you’re curious, this blog post has a score of 58.99.