Ten Tips: Writing MicroContent For Blogs, Webpages & Mobile Devices

Microcontent is a short piece of text, such as blurbs, text tips headings, page titles, and text that accompanies images. Jakob Nielsen warns, you get 40-60 characters to explain your microcontent. Unless the title or subject make it absolutely clear what the page or email is about, users will never open it.

Microcontent can also be other forms of media like an image, audio, video, a URL (hyperlink), Metadata like author, title, etc, the subject line of an email, an item in an RSS feed.

Webpages without microcontent are difficult to navigate especially when the user enters, not at the front door, but into the middle of the site. This article offers some guidelines for writing microcontent. 

1. Explanatory. Make each element communicate the essence of its target content. Ask yourself: If this microcontent was the only visible text on a page could the readers understand what the rest of the page contained?
   
2. Context. Web users share links, email and newsletters with each other. Many of them only receive fragments of your content in these exchanges. You can remedy any possible confusion by creating useful page titles, headlines, and subheads that make sense when read independently, i.e. outside the context of your site.  
    
3. Micro Text. Refine the text to be as short as possible without altering its original meaning. Keep headlines and subheads to 60 characters maximum. Links should be between 1-3 words long.
   
4. Balance. Pages with too much microcontent overwhelm the reader. Within reason, limit the number of links, subheads, etc. per page. If you need to create a long list of links or text chunks separate them it into sections with brief subheads.
   
5. Breaks. Try to avoid breaking sections into subsections in webpages. It works fine in print, but not online. Text content should be a maximum of 600 words. Use no more than 5 or 6 sections per page and no more than 3-4 emphasized items per section.
   
6. Tone. Explain the article in terms the user will understand. Use plain language. Avoid jargon and wordplay if possible. Not all readers will know that The Red Devils refers to Manchester United.
   
7. Remove the leading article (The) in title and headlines. As lists tend to be alphabetized, you want to avoid everything getting listed under "T" with other pages starting with "The".
   
8. Give opening words meaning. Use the name of the company, person or subject discussed in the article.
   
9. Precision. When writing microcontent for emails, highlight your email's contents in the "From" field. Avoid puns as some people may interpret this as spam.
   
10. Avoid teasers with clever puns and wordplays. Readers are tired of these and resent being tricked. Avoid page titles starting with the same word as they are hard to differentiate when scanning a list. Also, don't say 'Click Here' for every link give it some meaning.

A Few Examples

Email subject: check this out!

This looks like spam and will probably get deleted unread.

Email subject: London Show

This could be for many types of shows and also risks getting deleted. If the subject said London Multimedia Show July 2005 you would get a better response.

Email subject:   Apple Mac

The sender may knows that this is related to repairs to an Apple Mac. However, if the recipient is an MIS manager there could be many Apple Macs on his agenda.

It would be better to say Repaired Apple Mac for XYZ Co. ready for pickup.

Style Guides for Micro content

Two very popular style guides are:

and

What style guide do you use?