That could go both ways, more followers (even if lower click-through) will get more clicks then having say 2,000 followers.
TChachra
· 5 months ago
Very interesting...I have been worried that my lower following on Twitter means that my blog does not get traffic. I have 166 followers and cant seem to generate a lot of traffic...just yet. I think the above would make more sense when you get up into the thousands/tens of thousands of followers. GREAT Post.
Check out my blog. http://2s2d.net - A new attempt at tech blogging...for fun.
Adam AKA A.Beezy
· 5 months ago
That could go both ways, more followers (even if lower click-through) will get more clicks then having say 2,000 followers.
msuster
· 5 months ago
Good start. Would be great to see this when you get more data and do more analysis. Time of day obviously matters greatly. As with any marketing the text before the link also is a huge contributing factor. I'll also be click-through rates vary greatly based on authority. But nonetheless - I appreciate the 2.8% stat.
Matt Cheuvront
· 5 months ago
I think this proves that more is not necessarily better. Yes, it enhances your reach, but people are more willing to click-through from a source/individual they trust and value. If you work on building a relationship with 1,000 or so followers, you'll probably have a better response than link-dropping to an audience of thousands and thousands uninterested people.
I am not sure you can really properly calculate a click-through rate on Twitter.
Why?
Because clearly MOST of your followers will never receive the message.
Unlike email or direct mail, this is one of those marketing channels that is closer to radio or TV because people need to be tuned in (or remember to check your channel so to speak) in order to receive the message.
And we all know that if you follow more than a few hundred people on Twitter, it is almost impossible to keep up with them.
dbarefoot
· 5 months ago
Thanks for your comment. Actually, I think Twitter is a lot like email or direct mail marketing. As you no doubt know, only a decreasing fraction of recipients even open your email or direct mail piece. So that's kind of analogous to Twitter. I'd love to gather some attention data on the fraction of Twitter followers who 'see' a given tweet, but that would require, what, eye-tracking software and a bunch of dudes with lab coats?
Michael A. Stelzner
· 5 months ago
Hey Darren;
Because a Tweet is not addressable to a specific person (unlike a DM), I might disagree that it is like email.
I do agree there are some direct marketing correlations (in fact I wrote a paper on direct social media marketing).
However, like a newspaper ad, a Tweet's impact diminishes significantly minutes, hours and days after it is broadcast. Just looking at Bit.ly stats helps prove that. The exception is when it is retweeted.
Unless folks intentionally look at your Twitter timeline, they will likely never see your tweet unless they are following very few people OR are online when you tweet. Of course this changes if the post is retweeted.
All real interesting, nonetheless and I applaud you for getting your hands around the topic.
luca filigheddu
· 5 months ago
Since most of your followers will not get it, you can send it more than once. I usually do this for important tweets (like those about blog posts) and I send the same tweet up to 6-7 times during the day.
Name
· 2 months ago
Your then making it so your followers will not want to follow you or will ignore your name or icon. So doing that will increase results but will ultimately kill your flock.
luca filigheddu
· 2 months ago
never happened actually...
entwipreneur
· 5 months ago
very interesting post, thanks for writing this
San
· 5 months ago
Great information! I wonder if the numbers would be different if you used the number of impressions your tweet(s) received as opposed to the number of followers...
@greenpharey
David Lumerman
· 5 months ago
You also need to remember, that unlike other media, if your link has enough merit it will get re-tweeted, raising your clicks, but because of it you lose your true sample size so you can't judge the click through.
Eric
· 5 months ago
Scrape the spammers out of the denominator and you've got a presumably larger number. I suspect that ~15% of everyone's followers are of the "0 followers/5,000 following" ilk. Not sure that those should even factor into the equation.
Jims Connolly
· 5 months ago
Interesting post. I have 2 accounts; one with 3,000 followers and one with 20,000. The engagement level is just as high on both (as a percentage), based on what I have seen.
Mario F. Ruckh
· 5 months ago
Hi Darren,
Interesting stats, thanks for sharing. Surely CTRs there mean something different as not everybody is seeing it, but that isnt too different from an email campaign if you calculate clicks/emails-sent instead of clicks/opens.
Would be great if you could also share some figures about the spread of click through: So what's the highest and lowest you have seen or ideally if you calculate it per person, show the frequency of CTRs in certain bands (like 10% have 0-0.5%CTR).
Looking forward Cheers
QuantumGood
· 5 months ago
Ours is about as low as would be predicted. But rate should be calculated against reach, not followers, because retweets are where the vast majority of clicks originate from.
That is very true. When adding a retweet link to my posts I see a lot more reach and therefore larger amounts of clicks.
Darren
· 5 months ago
Indeed, I'd really like to see a survey that incorporates retweets (maybe via the Twitter API) in a more authoritative and clinical way.
Rich_Weaver
· 5 months ago
TweetReach does a full reach, maybe someone can get one just for RT's
Rich_Weaver
· 5 months ago
Tweets about TweetNirvana have reached 63,638 people - http://bit.ly/17PCBX (from TweetReach)
Steffan Antonas
· 5 months ago
Darren,
While I appreciate the 2.8% stat, I'm curious about your sampling. If you do bit.ly"+" analysis on very popular users' links (like @aplusk for example - who has about 2.5 million followers) you get a click through rate closer to 07.1% consistently. I have almost 11K followers, and I'm about the same. I've done this test with many of the power users who use bit.ly and get a similar CTR - always between 0.7 and 1%. Of course, the CTR also depends on time of day, day of the week etc. Sysomos released an amazing report on the Twitter ecosystem that is instructive. See it here - http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/#iphoneusers
dbarefoot
· 5 months ago
We talked about this a bit on Twitter, but indeed, as the follower count approaches and exceeds 10K, the CTR drops to 1% or lower.
I wrote a bit more on this, but it was cut from the article. Here's what I had:
As you might expect, there’s a relationship between the total number of followers and the clickthrough rate. If you have a small group of followers, you probably have a closer relationship with each of them. They’re likelier to click links that you share. A recent FriendFeed comment from Tim O'Reilly (http://bit.ly/IG5nR) bears this out. He's discussing the huge boost in followers he's received since being added to Twitter's Suggested Users List:
"I had about 60K twitter followers when I went on the SUL; my peak click through-rate has perhaps doubled now that I have 10 times as many. Organic followers are what matters, except, as I say, for the media credibility that you get from people who don't know any better."
Steffan Antonas
· 5 months ago
Thanks, Darren. I thought this was so. Tim's comment, as usual, is insightful.
Marc Bretzfelder
· 5 months ago
Do Spammers target larger accounts, or just Follow everyone? As your Followers increase do you simply attract more Spammers who aren't looking at your content or clicking through, therefor lowering your rate? At 10,000 Followers, I'm averaging about 1% click through. It does seem to be very topic specific, too, fluctuating from 40 to 300.
QuantumGood
· 5 months ago
If you autofollow, the more followers you have the more spammers you get, generally.
Naomi Trower
· 5 months ago
Very interesting article! I have noticed this trend although I tend to get RT'ed often. I have 8,000 followers for my business account and 4,100 followers on my quest for getting back in shape acct (LOL) I have learned the best timing for both accounts which is fun to do. I'm just having fun basically and meeting some really fun people in the process..hee! hee!
JTexada
· 5 months ago
I think that this is probably a good general average number,and I can't wait to see the results after you have more survey participants, but it seems like your reputation on twitter would have a lot to do with you click thru rate. If you have built a reputation as a trusted source then your rate would be higher than someone new to twitter, or with an unestablished reputation.
Mike McDermott
· 5 months ago
If you are looking to earn clicks, you have to put something significant to earn that click. A deal, something free, something funny or catchy. Most of the links that I post are significant, but only for a disproportionately small audience. I'll share a link on family which accounts for less than 1% of my following, but when I post a link about social media I get five times that amount of interest and clicks because my social network is made up of marketers, business people and folks with a strong affinity to social media. I have to say that if I sold car stereos, and most of my following were folks that buy or want to buy my product, and I offered a $100 off coupon with a short fuse on it. I would have five times the amount of "average" clickthrough.
Michelle Mangen
· 5 months ago
Interesting data, would like to see more on this as more people respond to the survey (which I will do). It seems counter-intuitive that the click through rate would actually decrease with the more followers you have.
Michael
· 5 months ago
This is obviously something that needs to be studied but this article's study is entirely useless. Not to be rude but I'm surprised Mashable posted this.
The study itself suffers from every bias known in statistics. It is a non-random, non-scientific study with both a response and a selection bias. Mr Barefoot and the other commenters seem to have many good ideas about what affects click through rates (times, number of followers, content, tinyurl vs full url etc) which are fine if presented as what they are: ideas. But if I ever come across a 'social media guru' who tells me that Twitter has 2.8% click through rate, I will know right away that he is a fraud.
This 'disclaimer' "Please also note that I’m not a statistician, so read the following analysis with that in mind." doesn't quite cover it.
Darren
· 5 months ago
Dude, easy there. I think I framed it as sufficiently unscientific. Not only did I point out that the number of data points was insufficient and that I'm not a statistician, but I also highlighted the mitigating factors that I perceived.
Anybody who takes this article as unassailable or even authoritative is misreading it. I'd love to see a peer-reviewed study executed by experts. I couldn't find one--that's why I tried this approach.
Michael
· 5 months ago
Hey Darren, Sorry if I insulted you. I was only trying to point out more clearly what you admitted in the article, which is that the study was totally unscientific and thus all conclusions drawn from it are invalid. I rarely comment on articles but was drawn to comment when I saw how many people were taking your stat as a fact that it clearly is not. You wouldn't want people citing your stats as facts accredited back to you when you yourself admit that the study is not a valid one, would you?
-Michael
dbarefoot
· 5 months ago
No worries. I don't think this little project is without merit, but I (as I said) want people to take it with a grain of salt. The piece's broader message is, of course, that Twitter is worth participating in, but it isn't some extraordinary gold mine of traffic.
Name
· 2 months ago
Your an idiot. If you saw he said 1.7% with the new stats and it changes for many factors and he obviously stated VERY CLEARLY. "That this wasnt scientific." I greatly applaud the info and it gives me an idea to run with and I concur with the stats and everyones good info and comments until I saw yours. You have no merit and nothing to offer in retrospect so why are you even wasting your time. Do you feel so confident in life about everything? Your the type of person whos ego and brain dont match!!
Sit down and shut up...and next time read the article through before you feel like open your fly catcher.
Mark William Schaefer
· 5 months ago
I don;t think you need to apologize, Michael. This should never have published. Totally irresponsible.
Name
· 2 months ago
Yet another tard. Whats irresponsible , there was nothing out there. Many research that has benefited the world has started off small or wrong. Effort produces results.
POS
Dario Meli
· 5 months ago
"’I'm uncertain about what impact bots spidering Twitter and following links are having on these results." - at this time i dont believe that bit.ly filters out bots from the stats to they arent totally accurate whereas http://ow.ly stats do filter out bots. [disclaimer: ow.ly is an Invoke service]
dm @quikness
bryanz
· 5 months ago
"but it outperforms the vast majority of online advertising stats that I’ve seen."
I'd certainly hope it outperforms click-thrus on online ads since Twitter is about a connection, right? You typically don't follow someone unless you want to know more about them. And if you're curious about them I'd think it's reasonable that you're also going to be curious about the kinds of links they post as that's a measure of what they find interesting.
SimoneIcough
· 5 months ago
Very interesting and I will be looking at my analytics for my %'s of CTRs from Twitter :)
Patrick Koppula
· 5 months ago
We did a similar analysis which found that people triple virality when promoting videos using a Twitmatic page (http://twitmatic.com/exchange). If you are going to dig deeper into your click-through analysis, you'll need to control for the number of people each follower is following, which, for instance, probably completely explains the drop off in clicks per follower. When you have more followers, the portion of them that are also following a ton of people (and hence are less likely to see your tweet) is greater. The takeaway for marketing and promotions: unless you can be one of the few people each of your followers follow, you need tools like a Twitmatic page to break through the noise (http://twitmatic.com/exchange).
DemandSpot
· 5 months ago
In DemandSpot some of our early users are getting a 60% click-through rate. We didn't believe it ourselves at first. Note that this isn't by just tweeting some link, but rather by sending @ messages to people who are very likely to be interested in the link's content. This amazing click-through rate seems to prove that it's all about relevance - you need to find the right audience and send out well targeted links. Just tweeting some link is akin to TV advertising - big audience, but very few are interested. What we do is more like search engine advertising - we capture intent. Being personal and relevant makes a world of difference.
Daren Brake
· 5 months ago
I have often wondered how accurate bit’ly is in the clicks that it gives. Because I have a website that I use Google analytics on and when I use bit’ly to post links on twitter back to my website. I get two different numbers Google will give me one number of visitors for that day and bitl’y will give me a different number for the click on the link that I posted. For example google will tell me I had 30 visitors and bit’ly will say that I had 40 clicks. So which one is right is the dilemma that I have concerning the accuracy of bit’liy
Katie
· 5 months ago
Hi there! I am the community manager for an alumni association. I've been carefully collecting data since March (150 linked tweets). On average I get a 4% click thru, but the success of the clicks is largely influenced by WHAT I send. I've categorized my data. Certain categories get much better hits; therefore I try to tweet what seems to be popular and was is RT'ed the most. I'd love to share my stuff with you kajohnson@csufresno.edu
Mark William Schaefer
· 5 months ago
I think this is a valid question to answer but honestly, with a sample size of 60 who people you know, this is hooey.
By posting this information prematurely, you're contributing to the statisitcal babble people will now report as fact because it was on Mashable.
Mark William Schaefer
· 5 months ago
I think this is a valid question to answer but honestly, with a sample size of 60 who people you know, this is hooey. By posting this information prematurely, you're contributing to the statisitcal babble people will now report as fact because it was on Mashable.
caseystubbs
· 5 months ago
Wow, You did alot of work to find out how twitter can get clicks. Good job.
FabianPattberg
· 5 months ago
I am getting a very good click-trough rate with Twitter (2400 followers). But then I only tweet on Sustainability topics. This is really a niche I would assume. Maybe this also influences the amount of traffic you get from Twitter.
I also find this interesting. I'm not a statistician either, but am finding similar clickthrough rates to my links
davereinhardt
· 5 months ago
Re: More followers --> less click throughs
My suspicion on this is because accounts with thousands and thousands of followers are often those where the followers are built through automated tools rather than by building relationships based on mutual interests, previous tweets, etc. So, I could have 3000 followers in a few days (and be following 3000 people, as typically these are reciprocated through bots) but in those 3000 most people aren't actually tuned into me. Or, I could have 200 followers built up over three months (as is the case for me) but I suspect that a significant percentage (not all, some will be reciprocal follows from corporates, etc.) chose to follow me 'cause what I am tweeting is of interest to them. Obviously, for well known people / media outlets, this is not the case.
Obviously, the answer is elusive. For example, I am in a niche market--Alzheimer's disease. On bit.ly my click through rate varies wildly for each Tweet.
It is obvious that some "headlines" bring more rain than others.
Brand also has an effect. I am sure Mashable does better than the Alzheimer's Reading Room. I know I click more on a few well known names and trusted names and ignore others.
So, in this sense, my guess is that it mirrors the real world.
I can't complain about the cost of a click through.
This article brought a lot of interesting and thought provoking comments. In this sense, a very useful discussion.
Bob
HECTOR ARTURO AZUZ
· 5 months ago
These stats are based in the most do... many twitter users have many followers & poor relationships while other twitter users have few followers & rich relationships but you can have special relationships with some followers (not all) and... at the same time... thousands of followers...
pavlicko
· 5 months ago
My twitter CTR runs between 3% for 80% of my tweets with links to as high as 10% for the other 20% of tweets with links- after looking at my bit.ly stats, the high CTRs were for:
1. free video encoding software 2. a teaser about a photoshop replacement 3. political links
I only tweeted links once, and I haven't done any mass following, so I think my followers are pretty much interested in whatever content I provide. Of course this doesn't account for when someone posts their own link to a site you tweet.
Really interesting post.
anna
· 4 months ago
this is probably a good general average number,and I can't wait to see the results after you have more survey participants, but it seems like your reputation on twitter would have a lot to do with you click thru rate. If you have built a reputation as a trusted source then your rate would be higher than someone new to twitter, or with an unestablished reputation.i just found this amazing website, it has all kind of businesses from cleaning companies to estate agents to banks...
Lawrence Greenberg
· 4 months ago
Your initial results ring true. My click-through rate average anywhere between 1 and 5 percent.
Anecdotally, I've observed that my tweets tend to receive the most click-throughs during the early part of the week, during the early work hours -- 8 to 10 am.
I also wonder how the number of people your followers are following affects the chance that they will see any individual tweet. I would imagine that the Twitter noise experienced by the unique user would be a significant factor.
Matt Smith
· 4 months ago
I'm glad that you did this little study and posted about it. It has been a question that I have wanted a clear answer on for some time to argue the value of social media.
Some important factors to consider:
It's not just about quantity of followers, but quality of followers. The people that I follow are those that are in my industry and would provide potentially helpful information for what I do. Most if not all of the people that I follow, follow me in return. Those that follow me without my first following them tend to come from other followers of mine–and happen to be in the same industry. Otherwise I "unfollow" them. If I have hundreds or thousands of people following me, that are in no way linked to my industry, then they will not click on the links that I post because it does not benefit them. (MANY people have hundreds or thousands of followers who have nothing to do with their industry.)
Also, how I establish myself as an authority figure in the area of my expertise determines a lot as to whether someone is going to click on a link that I post.
If I am all about marketing myself and trying to get people to "buy my services", then people will not listen to what I have to say. However, if I am truly trying to provide a service to my followers, without strings attached, then people will much more likely click on my links.
Lastly is the purpose in which people use Twitter, or other social media for that matter. I would say that a LARGE number of people use it merely to connect socially, and as this study shows:http://bit.ly/1ajlX5 most people are merely sheep, regardless of how many followers they have.
All Comments
Check out my blog. http://2s2d.net - A new attempt at tech blogging...for fun.
Why?
Because clearly MOST of your followers will never receive the message.
Unlike email or direct mail, this is one of those marketing channels that is closer to radio or TV because people need to be tuned in (or remember to check your channel so to speak) in order to receive the message.
And we all know that if you follow more than a few hundred people on Twitter, it is almost impossible to keep up with them.
Because a Tweet is not addressable to a specific person (unlike a DM), I might disagree that it is like email.
I do agree there are some direct marketing correlations (in fact I wrote a paper on direct social media marketing).
However, like a newspaper ad, a Tweet's impact diminishes significantly minutes, hours and days after it is broadcast. Just looking at Bit.ly stats helps prove that. The exception is when it is retweeted.
Unless folks intentionally look at your Twitter timeline, they will likely never see your tweet unless they are following very few people OR are online when you tweet. Of course this changes if the post is retweeted.
All real interesting, nonetheless and I applaud you for getting your hands around the topic.
@greenpharey
Interesting stats, thanks for sharing. Surely CTRs there mean something different as not everybody is seeing it, but that isnt too different from an email campaign if you calculate clicks/emails-sent instead of clicks/opens.
Would be great if you could also share some figures about the spread of click through: So what's the highest and lowest you have seen or ideally if you calculate it per person, show the frequency of CTRs in certain bands (like 10% have 0-0.5%CTR).
Looking forward
Cheers
For an idea of retweets (not clicks) by reach see "The 100 Most Influential People in Twitter:" http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/list.asp?l...
While I appreciate the 2.8% stat, I'm curious about your sampling. If you do bit.ly"+" analysis on very popular users' links (like @aplusk for example - who has about 2.5 million followers) you get a click through rate closer to 07.1% consistently. I have almost 11K followers, and I'm about the same. I've done this test with many of the power users who use bit.ly and get a similar CTR - always between 0.7 and 1%. Of course, the CTR also depends on time of day, day of the week etc. Sysomos released an amazing report on the Twitter ecosystem that is instructive. See it here - http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/#iphoneusers
I wrote a bit more on this, but it was cut from the article. Here's what I had:
As you might expect, there’s a relationship between the total number of followers and the clickthrough rate. If you have a small group of followers, you probably have a closer relationship with each of them. They’re likelier to click links that you share. A recent FriendFeed comment from Tim O'Reilly (http://bit.ly/IG5nR) bears this out. He's discussing the huge boost in followers he's received since being added to Twitter's Suggested Users List:
"I had about 60K twitter followers when I went on the SUL; my peak click through-rate has perhaps doubled now that I have 10 times as many. Organic followers are what matters, except, as I say, for the media credibility that you get from people who don't know any better."
The study itself suffers from every bias known in statistics. It is a non-random, non-scientific study with both a response and a selection bias. Mr Barefoot and the other commenters seem to have many good ideas about what affects click through rates (times, number of followers, content, tinyurl vs full url etc) which are fine if presented as what they are: ideas. But if I ever come across a 'social media guru' who tells me that Twitter has 2.8% click through rate, I will know right away that he is a fraud.
This 'disclaimer' "Please also note that I’m not a statistician, so read the following analysis with that in mind." doesn't quite cover it.
Anybody who takes this article as unassailable or even authoritative is misreading it. I'd love to see a peer-reviewed study executed by experts. I couldn't find one--that's why I tried this approach.
Sorry if I insulted you. I was only trying to point out more clearly what you admitted in the article, which is that the study was totally unscientific and thus all conclusions drawn from it are invalid. I rarely comment on articles but was drawn to comment when I saw how many people were taking your stat as a fact that it clearly is not. You wouldn't want people citing your stats as facts accredited back to you when you yourself admit that the study is not a valid one, would you?
-Michael
Sit down and shut up...and next time read the article through before you feel like open your fly catcher.
POS
dm @quikness
I'd certainly hope it outperforms click-thrus on online ads since Twitter is about a connection, right? You typically don't follow someone unless you want to know more about them. And if you're curious about them I'd think it's reasonable that you're also going to be curious about the kinds of links they post as that's a measure of what they find interesting.
Note that this isn't by just tweeting some link, but rather by sending @ messages to people who are very likely to be interested in the link's content.
This amazing click-through rate seems to prove that it's all about relevance - you need to find the right audience and send out well targeted links. Just tweeting some link is akin to TV advertising - big audience, but very few are interested. What we do is more like search engine advertising - we capture intent. Being personal and relevant makes a world of difference.
By posting this information prematurely, you're contributing to the statisitcal babble people will now report as fact because it was on Mashable.
http://twitter.com/FabianPattberg
My suspicion on this is because accounts with thousands and thousands of followers are often those where the followers are built through automated tools rather than by building relationships based on mutual interests, previous tweets, etc. So, I could have 3000 followers in a few days (and be following 3000 people, as typically these are reciprocated through bots) but in those 3000 most people aren't actually tuned into me. Or, I could have 200 followers built up over three months (as is the case for me) but I suspect that a significant percentage (not all, some will be reciprocal follows from corporates, etc.) chose to follow me 'cause what I am tweeting is of interest to them. Obviously, for well known people / media outlets, this is not the case.
That's what I reckon anyway.
http://davereinhardt.wordpress.com / @davereinhardt
Good article and good thought process.
Obviously, the answer is elusive. For example, I am in a niche market--Alzheimer's disease. On bit.ly my click through rate varies wildly for each Tweet.
It is obvious that some "headlines" bring more rain than others.
Brand also has an effect. I am sure Mashable does better than the Alzheimer's Reading Room. I know I click more on a few well known names and trusted names and ignore others.
So, in this sense, my guess is that it mirrors the real world.
I can't complain about the cost of a click through.
This article brought a lot of interesting and thought provoking comments. In this sense, a very useful discussion.
Bob
1. free video encoding software
2. a teaser about a photoshop replacement
3. political links
I only tweeted links once, and I haven't done any mass following, so I think my followers are pretty much interested in whatever content I provide. Of course this doesn't account for when someone posts their own link to a site you tweet.
Really interesting post.
Anecdotally, I've observed that my tweets tend to receive the most click-throughs during the early part of the week, during the early work hours -- 8 to 10 am.
I also wonder how the number of people your followers are following affects the chance that they will see any individual tweet. I would imagine that the Twitter noise experienced by the unique user would be a significant factor.
Some important factors to consider:
It's not just about quantity of followers, but quality of followers. The people that I follow are those that are in my industry and would provide potentially helpful information for what I do. Most if not all of the people that I follow, follow me in return. Those that follow me without my first following them tend to come from other followers of mine–and happen to be in the same industry. Otherwise I "unfollow" them. If I have hundreds or thousands of people following me, that are in no way linked to my industry, then they will not click on the links that I post because it does not benefit them. (MANY people have hundreds or thousands of followers who have nothing to do with their industry.)
Also, how I establish myself as an authority figure in the area of my expertise determines a lot as to whether someone is going to click on a link that I post.
If I am all about marketing myself and trying to get people to "buy my services", then people will not listen to what I have to say. However, if I am truly trying to provide a service to my followers, without strings attached, then people will much more likely click on my links.
Lastly is the purpose in which people use Twitter, or other social media for that matter. I would say that a LARGE number of people use it merely to connect socially, and as this study shows:http://bit.ly/1ajlX5 most people are merely sheep, regardless of how many followers they have.