Keeping Audiences Engaged: What’s the Secret?

Audience attention spans are short but critical for content creators. Two factors determine if content can engage audiences: processing effort and emotional language. Content with familiar, concrete, and easy-to-understand language keeps readers more engaged. Similarly, content with the language of hope, anxiety, and excitement can also hold audience attention. Content creators can use these features to create more impactful content. They can also create more useful content that counters content recommendation algorithms that push negative or harmful content.

Audience attention spans have always been at a premium. Now, daily increasing volumes of

content are competing for ever-reducing attention spans of modern audiences across various media. Advertisers and marketers want consumers to watch their ads, organisational leaders want employees to read their communication, and content creators want audiences to consume their content. Everyone is working harder to attract and keep those narrow attention spans because audience engagement is key to relevance, influence, and ultimately, survival. However, not all content is capable of captivating audiences. A study tries to address the question: What makes some content more engaging?

The study found that two linguistic characteristics determine the level of audience

engagement. The first of these is processing ease, that is, how much mental effort audiences have to spend to understand the text of the content. Comprehension effort depends on the length of the words, how familiar audiences are with them, or how concrete they are. For example, the word “money” is far easier to comprehend than “fiduciary”. Similarly, for sentences, paragraphs, or other larger chunks of text, comprehension effort depends on length and syntactical complexity. For example, “He fell asleep on the bench” is easier to process than “Sitting on the bench, he started slumbering”.

The second characteristic is emotion. Language that evokes arousal and uncertainty is

relevant for audience engagement. Some emotions are marked by certainty (e.g., anger and pride), while others are characterised by uncertainty (e.g., hope, anxiety and surprise). Uncertainty holds attention as people try to reduce uncertainty by going through the content and finding out what will happen. Emotions also differ in their level of arousal (creating psychological alertness). Some emotions are more arousing (e.g., anger, excitement, and anxiety), while some are less (e.g., sadness and contentment). Arousal leads to an increase in vigilance when encountering content and can help to hold attention. Therefore, the language of hope, anxiety, and excitement is most capable of retaining attention.

Good marketing practice has always depended on using language precisely to communicate with customers. This post discusses how to convey good news-bad news messages to buyers properly.

Interestingly, the study also discovered that language that grabs attention does not

necessarily hold attention. For instance, language that requires higher processing effort can capture attention even though it doesn’t keep the audience engaged. Similarly, language conveying emotions with certainty are good at catching attention but not at retaining it. Language that evokes arousal, however, can capture attention as well as retain it. Thus, when generating any content, the content creator will benefit from paying attention to whether the language used by them will fail to grab audiences, merely capture their attention, or keep them engaged in the content.

This study is significant and relevant to content creators in all fields of activity. It provides

milestones for them to create more impactful content. While some content naturally holds attention more (e.g., celebrity gossip), shifts in language can help other types of content (e.g., climate change) gain more engagement. For example, replacing hard-to-understand expressions like “carbon footprint” with familiar expressions like “Carbon dioxide emission” or using the right emotional language to convey the criticality of the issue can keep audiences more engaged and drive home the message more strongly.

More importantly, this study also has important societal implications for content

recommendation algorithms. Since anxious and angry content holds attention, training algorithms to maximise sustained audience attention might make them focus on hate speech and disinformation, which could have negative implications for individuals as well as society. Using the information from this study, content creators can counter such algorithms and create content that holds attention and is also useful and meaningful.

Retailers can harness the impact of language on buyers to create more impactful promotions, for example, whether to call a promotion a sale or a clearance. Find out what works and why.