Every second, we are bombarded with an unbreakable chain flow of information. Our attention is becoming an incredibly scarce resource in the world. Whether you are on Twitter (also known as X), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, WhatsApp, Threads, etc., it is proving to be time-consuming and brain-draining to keep up with a massive rush of updates and viral content.

From businesses and organizations’ standpoint, engaging audiences in a digital space has never been harder. One’s messaging must break through a plethora of constant breaking news, political drama, entertainment, and targeted content from businesses, influencers, and social media users. Effectively capturing the audience’s attention is one of the most formidable challenges in public engagement initiatives.

In the information age, having good content is one thing, and effectively engaging your audience is another thing. I can only imagine how many great ideas have been buried in obscurity not because they weren’t good enough, but just because they failed to impress within the first eight seconds of interacting with their audiences.

Recent studies show that humans’ attention span on the internet has diminished to 8 seconds, a 25% decrease in a little over a decade. These statistics depict an economic problem. People’s attention has become significantly limited to engaging with the excessive amounts of content in the digital universe.

If you add the limitations of time and space into the equation, it means public engagement in digital platforms comes with opportunity costs. Within eight seconds your audience decides on whether to interact with your content or utilize their attention elsewhere. The following are a few tips on how you can maximize your ability to capture your audience’s attention in the digital space:

Storytelling
Throughout centuries, storytelling has been the bedrock of civilizations around the world. Prior invention of ancient scrolls, printing, texting, and social media posting, there was storytelling. Oral traditions of history and wisdom would be transferred from one generation to another until humans invented ways to communicate those stories in other means such as writing.

Storytelling is powerful. That is why to this day, we have religious and other cultural traditions that have been around for thousands of years to inspire and educate us. In our modern and highly sophisticated world, we are still pulled towards storytelling that comes in a myriad of ways. Movies that tell powerful stories tend to stick with audiences to the point that most of them become anecdotal to our real-world lifestyles.

Simply put, if you want to engage your audience, tell a story. This doesn’t mean that we forsake the ethos of professionalism or diverge from the subject matter of our expertise. On the contrary, unless your audience is members of academia who are willing to embark on a painstaking labor of scouring jargon and highly technical content, you can still convert your product, service, or agenda into storytelling.

Brevity is King
In the Holy Scriptures, there is an account in the Gospel of John where Jesus was in Jerusalem at the pool called Bethesda. This pool was believed to have supernatural powers to heal sicknesses and infirmities. All one had to do was to get in the pool as soon as the angel came down to stir the water.

Jesus approached one man who had been sick for thirty-eight years and asked him “Do you want to be healed?” You would imagine the answer would be “Yes, of course!” But the man took Jesus through a historical account, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”

Flipping the order of the above dialogue, it is your audience who has questions when engaging with your content: What do you have for me? Writers and creators who effectively engage their audience do have one thing in common, apart from recognizing who they are speaking to, they also anticipate their audiences’ questions and answer them in the most succinct way possible. If eight seconds is all you have to tell your audience what you do and what’s in for them, you have no luxury to hide your core message in the jungle of redundant words. Less is more. Use your words sparingly.


Bottom Line Up Front
How do you get your message across in a traffic jam of excessive content? Capture your audience's attention. In their book “Made to Stick”, Chip Heath and Dan Heath argue that one of the secrets to effectively capturing your audience’s attention is to put the bottom line up front (BLUF). In a fast-paced world, we scan the content to find “what’s in for me?” before we allocate our attention to engage with it.