Twitter click-through percentages: Fool’s Gold

Everyone sure loves talking about Twitter. I am certainly as guilty as anyone else—just check out the tag cloud on the homepage for an inkling of just how much this chat-soup service has pervaded our business and personal lives.

For the longest time, I’ve convinced myself that the secret to success on Twitter is the f-word: followers. Back when I was in the 200s, I assumed that few people were sending traffic to my links and/or retweeting what I had to say because the audience pool was more akin to a drop in a bucket than a roaring river. As I’ve grown through the Twitter ranks, I’ve noticed a little more success coming my way, but nothing near the 500+ hits per link and 50 retweets that I would prefer to see. “Just hang in there, Mario,” I keep telling myself.  “Once you hit thousands of followers, your every word will be like scripture for the Twitter masses who follow you.”

Will it?

Thanks to one of Twitter’s little twists, you can see exactly how many people are clicking on the links passed from a specific Twitter account. And, unfortunately, it ain’t lookin’ good: Save for the usual outliers, Twitter traffic scales—and that’s not a good thing. Whether you have a million followers or a hundred, you just aren’t going to see the kind of massive clickthroughs that you’d expect given your direct connection to that many people’s lives and/or online chat environments. Forget about the message, forget about the audience. The Twitterverse just isn’t doing that much clicking.

Here’s a quick rundown of how this works. As mentioned, Twitter defaults to the URL shortening service bit.ly whenever you paste a huge link into your update box. One of the neater features of bit.ly is that it’ll give you a full breakdown of who’s clicked and talked about your link–in essence, a detailed statistical look at just how popular your shortened link has become. Acquiring this information for any bit.ly link under the sun is as easy as appending a plus sign (+) to the end of any hyperlink that starts with http://bit.ly. Voilà. Instant statistics.

Applying this information to a tweet I sent around some time ago (http://bit.ly/3vMCOm), we can quickly see that my post on Twitter generated a grand total of 67 outbound clicks. That’s not too shabby, I suppose, given that my twitter feed has 1,184 followers. And, for what it’s worth, I did have a single retweeter helping me out on his own Twitter feed (cough, cough). But if we want to widen the scope of Twitter click patterns, we might as well go for the big guns—the service’s most-followed users. After all, if I can get a pretty good ratio of people clicking on a link, that must mean that a user with a million followers will essentially command an army of clickers, delivering massive traffic to whatever he or she links to on Twitter. Right?

Wrong. In the interest of time, I’m going to take a random sampling of links from Twitter’s top five users (as of now) and show you just how the ratio works out.

Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk)
~3,800,000 followers
Link: 15 Funniest Videos Of Fans Rushing The Field http://bit.ly/6SriX
Total clicks: 5,328
Percentage of followers clicking: 0.14%

Britney Spears (@britneyspears)
~3,400,000 followers
Link: Check out Brit’s amazing cover of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” from her show last night. http://bit.ly/4lvpKe -Adam, manager
Total clicks: 25,768
Percentage of followers clicking: 0.74%

CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk)
~2,800,000 followers
Link: Rio to host the 2016 Olympic Games http://bit.ly/16L69T
Total clicks: 8,912
Percentage of followers clicking: 0.23%

Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian)
~2,500,000 followers
Link: Check out my Letterman look!!! http://bit.ly/2lfRbM Had so much fun on the show!
Total clicks: 43,547
Percentage of followers clicking: 1.74%

Twitter (@twitter)
~2,400,000 followers
Link: Thanks to all our investors for sharing our long term vision. http://bit.ly/tWPDc
Total clicks: 9,130
Percentage of followers clicking: 0.38%

Obviously, different Twitter accounts will find different success rates with whatever it is they’re tweeting. But let’s not jump to conclusions and assume that everyone out there in Twitterland is hitting a 60-percent success rate with whatever it is they link to. There are still viral exceptions to the rule. There are still users who, for whatever wit or reason, can capture the attention of a large percentage of their user base. But, for the most part, even content that many could find engaging—fans of Kim Kardashian checking out her new outfits, breaking news like Rio’s Olympic Games victory, or a link that’s proven successful on other huge social media entities like Digg—simply isn’t. Forty-thousand people clicking on a link is pretty good. That’s still an insignificant amount when you have access to an audience of millions.

So how do you do it? How do you hit that Twitter golden age of immense popularity and user follow-through? You don’t. Twitter is not a panacea. It’s just one more tool in a marketer’s arsenal. If you can find some unique way to make yourself known on the service, that’s great. But don’t rely on Twitter as the end-all, be-all pathway between the general Internet world and your new marketing dreams. If you’re finding more and more that you’re getting increased attention on the service, then shift your resources to address your audience from that angle. Just don’t make Twitter the single tank in your army or you’re liable to get crushed…by indifference.

Comments

[Susan Breidenbach]

Social media is supposed to be about building relationships. Then, any viral marketing you do uses that network of relationships as a foundation and launching pad. You can’t possibly have relationships with tens of thousands of people. There are a handful of celebrities who are like Pied Pipers, with throngs of followers who live vicariously through them and hang on their every words. Large followings may make some kind of sense in that context. But for most of us, they don’t. We need to think of social media platforms such as Twitter as SEARCH platforms. Search for conversations of interest, and join them, offering your expertise, and build a reputation and meaningful relationships that way.

[Tyson]

If you want to combine URL shortening with Google Analytics tracking, I built a Firefox sidebar extension for this very purpose. Check out Snip-n-Tag (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11492). You can use your own bit.ly account, or choose from other services like cli.gs or tinyurl.

I’ve always felt like metrics from bit.ly and these other services were a bit suspect, so I prefer to use Google Analytics to track Twitter traffic.

Anyways…hope this is helpful. Keep up the great work with the blog!

Tyson

[Eivind Savio]

Hi

I have made a bookmark version earlier that combines the Cligs URL shortener and Google Analytics campaign tracking.

If I find some spare time I will try to implement bit.ly also. Anyway, you find my solution here if you want to take a look:
http://www.savio.no/blogg/a/82/google-analytics-campaign-url-builder-with-short-url-and-twitter-posting

Keep up the great work on this blog.