What content marketers can learn from fake news

We’ve all recently been made aware of the proliferation of fake news, particularly within social media. Many large social media companies and reputable publishers are experimenting with ways to help readers recognize which news is fake.

For example, earlier this month Facebook created The Journalism Project to help combat fake news. And the publisher Slate has launched a Chrome extension that allows people to flag fake news.

Despite these and other past efforts, fake news is not going anywhere anytime soon. And nothing shares the blame more than our very own brain and how we, as humans, think.

According to a recent article in Slate, decades of research on human memory indicate that warnings will not be a cure for the fake news problem.

"When you read (or hear) a news story—and especially if you don’t give it your full attention—you don’t retain every single detail. You get the gist of the story. You remember the main idea but forget the details, even as you are reading the story." Not only are the details lost, we also easily forget contextual information bearing on the credibility of the story, including its source.

Nature + Internet

One of the culprits is how we process language. Scientific American puts it this way, “Processing language takes a fair amount of thought. We use a short-term mental sketch pad, so-called working memory, to hold each word and its meaning in mind long enough to combine it with others. If the meaning of any of the words is unclear, the task becomes harder.”

But it’s not just how nature has hard-wired our brain. It’s also how environmental factors, such as the internet, have changed the way we read. Numerous studies, such as this one by Nielson, have concluded that when reading on the web only 28% of the text is read. Thus, the reader reads mostly headlines and scans text, often missing key salient points.

And because most of our reading is done on the web, this has spilled over into printed reading formats as well.

For content marketers--and at this point we all are, in one way or another--this has major implications.

People aren’t reading everything on your page, no matter how clever it is. They are scanning headings, bulleted lists, and bolded words to see if you’ve answered their question(s).

And if through scanning they can’t determine whether or not their answer lies in your content, they won’t read more to find out.

Design for "scanners"

When designing your content for those who scan, as well as the ones who decide to dive deeper, use headers to tell the overarching story. If you’re writing an ebook, for example, someone scanning should be able to flip through the pages and understand the content’s relevance to them just by reading headers and sub-headers. This requires being accurate, not just clever.

Your headings need to act as a road map through your content, making it easy for people to get where they want to go as fast as possible.

More tips

Use these 7 additional tips to help ensure your content will pass the scan test and engage your readers enough that they'll take the plunge and read more:

1. Write in the active voice.* When you write in the active voice, your noun is acting upon the verb rather than being acted upon. Copy written in the passive voice is often more vague, more wordy and less impactful / persuasive.

2. Break complex topics into a series of posts. This helps keeping people coming back for more and your reader will find it easier to digest and retain your content.

3. Structure your paragraphs in the inverted pyramid style. This means stating your conclusion first, then supporting it with the sentences that follow. This helps scanners move from point to point and decide where they’d like to dive in deeper.

4. Embrace the line break. Even complex content can be made much more reader-friendly with the simple introduction of lots of white space.

5. Keep paragraphs short. Feature one idea per paragraph, and keep them short — three or four sentences at most. Short sentences seem like less of a commitment, they seem less overwhelming. Simple sentences void of any complicated structures have the same impact.

6. Highlight content strategically. Add emphasis to your content by bolding important concepts. Your reader will be able to scan through and pick out the most important information at a glance.

7. Aim for "cognitive fluency".** High cognitive fluency means something is easy to think about, meaning people will be more willing to engage with the copy. Use words and phrases that are familiar to your audience. Write the way most people speak...simply and concisely.

But at the end of the day, it's most important to write copy that is relevant to your audience and helps them solve their problems, no matter how well written it is.