What Is White Space and Why Should You Use It?

Updated: November 11, 2021

You might have heard the term “white space” thrown around a few times when discussing digital marketing. It’s often said but rarely explained, and it’s used even less by your average community manager. However, there are huge, intuitive benefits to using it in your social media efforts, so read on to learn what white space is and why you should use it!

What is white space?

What white space is

White space is just what it sounds like: blank or empty space. In this context, however, we’re specifically going to focus on the white space of text within a social media post and is typically achieved by using a simple line break.

Notice that there’s full, empty space between sentences in the example above – not just a sentence on the line underneath.

Why use white space?

There are three main reasons to use white space:

  1. It’s scientifically proven that users read and digest content faster if laid out vertically on social media. Essentially, people typically only read the first few words on the left side of a screen.
  2. If you use white space, more of your content will be on the left! You can then drive users’ attention to the most exciting aspects of your caption.
  3. Content is just easier to digest with spaces in between.

This same phenomenon is amplified when applied to social media since users spend such a short amount of time on a post (average of 1.7s per piece of content on Facebook). Use white space on all your social media channels for clean posts that catch users’ interests easily!

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