Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

luca filigheddu — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:08:58 -0000

never happened actually...

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Name — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:02:40 -0000

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

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Name — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:01:47 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Name — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:52:54 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Matt Smith — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:16:17 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Lawrence Greenberg — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:20:05 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

anna — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:42:29 -0000

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...

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

@hectorarturo — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:23:10 -0000

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...

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Bob DeMarco — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:40:48 -0000

Darren....

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

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

davereinhardt — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:35:03 -0000

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.

That's what I reckon anyway.

http://davereinhardt.wordpr... / @davereinhardt

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Haroun Kola — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:26:12 -0000

I also find this interesting. I'm not a statistician either, but am finding similar clickthrough rates to my links

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

FabianPattberg — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:02:41 -0000

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.

http://twitter.com/FabianPa...

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

caseystubbs — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:27:37 -0000

Wow, You did alot of work to find out how twitter can get clicks. Good job.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Rich_Weaver — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:28:41 -0000

Tweets about TweetNirvana have reached 63,638 people - http://bit.ly/17PCBX (from TweetReach)

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Rich_Weaver — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:25:11 -0000

TweetReach does a full reach, maybe someone can get one just for RT's

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Mark William Schaefer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:09:22 -0000

I don;t think you need to apologize, Michael. This should never have published. Totally irresponsible.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Mark William Schaefer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:01:39 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Mark William Schaefer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:48:45 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

luca filigheddu — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:27:25 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Katie — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:24:34 -0000

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

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Daren Brake — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:12:22 -0000

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

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

DemandSpot — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:08:24 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Michael A. Stelzner — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:05:11 -0000

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.

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Patrick Koppula — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:43:39 -0000

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).

Re: What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect From Twitter?

Steffan Antonas — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:35:04 -0000

Thanks, Darren. I thought this was so. Tim's comment, as usual, is insightful.