If you don’t understand why people love listicals, or think they are uninformative and lazy, think again.

Consider Buzzfeed. Listicals lay at the heart of Buzzfeed’s content strategy. The success Buzzfeed has seen in recent years only goes to prove why people love listicals.

Your brain loves them

Listicals’ appeal don’t end with millennials. Your brain loves them, too.

People are constantly bombarded with information, and it can be tough to sort out and make sense of the information.

Peter Doolitle, who has a PhD in educational psychology, explains how our brains are consuming information at an extremely fast rate, because working memory is limited in terms of capacity, duration, and focus.

Listicals make it easy to quickly view the content, make sense of it, and determine if it’s worth reading.

Your schedule loves them

Another reason why people love listicals has to do with time. With the amount of time you spend online, you want to make this time as efficient as possible. You don’t want to waste your time sorting through large paragraphs simply to determine if the article is worth reading, or spending hours online going through the constant information being thrown at you to decide what content you want to consume. 

Listicals make it easy to scan the article and determine if it’s worth reading because they present information in quick, digestible chunks. You don’t have to filter through long paragraphs to determine good writing or good content, or to find the information you’re looking for. They help you easily and quickly judge the ideas and decide if it’s forth further reading.

Your content marketing strategy loves them

Whenever your scanning an article for nothing in particular, difference catches your eye and makes you stop and focus.  It piques your interest.

Listicals provide a rich environment for multimedia, because multimedia provides this difference.  It catches your attention, and intrigues you enough to read the post.

The more multimedia involved in a listical blog, the easier and quicker it is for readers to understand the content. Plus, it makes their reading experience much more engaging and enjoyable.

Face it. Lists are everywhere. Grocery lists, to-do lists, pro/con lists, etc. It’s why people love listicals—and why you could benefit from incorporating them into your content marketing strategy. They usher people down the marketing funnel by quickly and efficiently helping people decide to read more. Listicals aren’t just for millennial readers—everyone loves them.