
The Continuous Decay of “List Posts”
Why content marketers need to start experimenting with a new form
Article tunes: the sweet quiet of a public library
There is no denying that “list posts” are the proven, most effective way to get people to read articles. Content marketers have been touting their magical qualities for years now, starting with the revolution of Buzzfeed and are now most likely happily sitting in your Google Drive, waiting for the final edit.
Countless studies, articles, and training sessions explore the science behind list-posts, but I find this quote from the New Yorker article “A List of Reasons Why Our Brains Loves Lists” to sum up all those studies up nicely.
The article-as-numbered-list has several features that make it inherently captivating: the headline catches our eye in a stream of content; it positions its subject within a preëxisting category and classification system, like “talented animals”; it spatially organizes the information; and it promises a story that’s finite, whose length has been quantified upfront. Together, these create an easy reading experience, in which the mental heavy lifting of conceptualization, categorization, and analysis is completed well in advance of actual consumption — a bit like sipping green juice instead of munching on a bundle of kale. And there’s little that our brains crave more than effortlessly acquired data.
With lists, content marketers can help shape how readers are understanding and experiencing the information in the article. Our brains instantly (and generally even without our knowledge) put new information into some sort of spaciality. This piece goes here. That piece on top. That other piece next to it. So and so forth until a yummy green smoothie to sip on is conjured.
List posts make web content writing a Color-By-Numbers: we provide the outline and numbers, the reader provides the color.
I imagine us content marketers devilishly laughing while we stretch our powerful writing muscles to literally shape how people think about the topic at hand.
But do we really have that power?
We’ve all written the “10 Ways to Increase Your Followers” or “The 9 Reasons Windex Cures Everything.” And let’s be honest, the first list post was fun. It was easy breaking up points into easily digestible chunks. Not only do readers find them more palatable, as content marketers it makes our job way easier. We can take any topic and break it into a bajillion individual articles. We just must simply forget everything we learned about English and prose and basically embellish a web-version of an annotated bibliography.
You might be catching on to the slight bitterness in my words.
List posts are the most ubiquitous form of writing on the internet, and hence have become what readers expect.
We have cornered ourselves into a continuous decay of form. Readers like list posts, we write list posts, readers read list posts, we write more list posts, readers expect list posts, we write more list posts, readers only read the bullet or scroll to the funny photo, we write more lists posts and start hating list posts, readers get bored of list posts, we still write more list posts. We might try to tweak them by just bulleting or using headers instead of numbers, but, hey, that’s still a list.
How many articles about increasing Instagram followers did you read before you realized that literally every single one had the exact same tips, just worded differently, and that none of the points gave real, in-depth advice? When was the last time you really read all the content in a list post, instead of cherry-picking and skim-reading, all without gaining any new valuable knowledge?
There’s no denying it, the “internet is maturing.” A title of “7 Reasons Why Instagram Will Boost Your Business” no longer does it. Not only are readers aware that list posts are, at best, a mere surface-level attempt at spreading information, they have also been cheated so many times with clickbait. I find xkcd’s comic reimagining historical headlines as clickbait puts a lighter spin on my doomsday-ing.
The question is are we, as content marketers, maturing along with our audience? List posts have proven so damn successful that there is no momentum to move beyond them. Why bother changing if lists convert new customers and re-engage old ones?
Why bother indeed. While list posts are the best way to get a lot of ideas across in a relatively short amount of time (catering to the increasingly diminishing attention span of humanity as a whole), we have gotten ourselves caught in a whirlpool, sucking out any chance for creativity in article and blog writing.
I don’t know about all of you, but I feel like a machine made to just publish more crap on the internet for SEO. But I really love what I do and I want to keep it relevant for not just me but for the companies and audience that I write for. I’d hate to be part of movement that reduces humanity’s reading ability down to bullet points.
So how do we find ways to subvert the list post and all its faces to find a newly minted format for content creation (for us)? Can we find ways to write that are actually helpful (for the reader)? How do we mature?
So here’s my challenge: let’s start testing.
We all have numbers we need to meet, goals and KPIs to accomplish, but let’s be brave. For your next blog post, step away from the list. See if you can configure the structure in a new way that still helps readers but also captures their attention. We might just discover the next best conversion and engagement tool along the way.
If you do this, respond to this article linking to your new post so we can all see how you subverted the status quo.
