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"Have you heard the one about goldfish having a 3-second memory span? Would it shock you to know that some studies suggest the average adult attention span comes in at less than that \u2014 just 2.8 seconds?\nOther research is more generous, pegging the average attention span in 2012 as eight seconds, although this is down four seconds from the 2000 average, which suggests that we're not getting any more patient as the years go on.\nIn our busy, media-saturated, distraction-rich lives, marketers, brands and media outlets have to work harder and faster to grab our attention, giving rise to the buzzword in question \u2014 \"snackable content.\"\n\nStill with us? Good. In simple terms, snackable content is an easy concept to grasp \u2014 it is described as bite-sized chunks of info that can be quickly \"consumed\" by its audience. Glenn Engler, the CEO of Digital Influence Group, uses a blunt food analogy to define the term.\n\"The huge Hershey's bar too much? Here are some bite-sized candies. The big bag of chips too big? Have a snack pack. Big bag of cookies too filling? Here are 100-calorie packages,\" Engler writes, before explaining why this is important to drive engagement.\n\"It drives trial \u2014 and, as a parallel, engagement. It's easy to nibble and try without feeling that it's too much effort or the impact will be too negative.\"\nSo taking Engler's ideas and chewing them up them in a way that would probably not delight him, the so-called \"long-read\" could be seen as a nutritious, well-balanced meal, while snackable content is the fast food of the content world. Does this make snackable content a negative thing, or as inevitable as a Starbucks popping up in your neighborhood?\n\nStill with us? Wow. At a SXSW panel examining the future of snackable content, Brad Cohen, JESS3's then-director of interactive strategy, argued that short-form content isn't necessarily a dumbing down of media, just a reflection that \"everything is getting smaller and faster.\"\nWith speed of the essence, and more and more time being spent on smaller, mobile screens, Cohen suggests that snackable content should be easily graspable and able to be consumed \"faster than reading an explanation of the same info.\" Think images, infographics, illustrations and short videos.\nAnd while such content is designed to be consumed quickly, that doesn't necessarily mean you're not crediting your audience with more in-depth understanding. Cohen states snackable content should ideally \"create deeper meaning through references to shared stories or experiences.\"\n\nAre you seriously still here? Amazing. So \"snackable content\" is short-form data \u2014 be it text, imagery or video \u2014 that consumers can quickly engage with, possibly on-the-go, possibly on a smaller screen, that will hopefully leave them hungry for more, similar content in the future.\nThanks for your attention. Here's a link to a GIF of a cat sitting on a hamburger in space to show our gratitude. We wouldn't advise staring at it for more than three seconds though \u2014 you might forget where you are.\nImages courtesy of Flickr, Wendy Copley, Gamene/Megan, Amorette Dye, Bunches and Bits {Karina}"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/04/29/snackable-content-buzzword/>