Posted on: - by Robyn Smith
I’ve found a great infographic from social media expert Dan Zarrella which summarises some studies he’s conducted on click through rates (CTRs) on Twitter links.
He’s given out some really valuable information which could help to improve your Twitter interaction rates so I thought it would be useful for everyone to have that info in text format rather than a screen consuming image!
There are results from quite a few different studies in here so I’ve just picked a few I think are the easiest to implement straight away:
Tweets between 120 and 130 characters have highest CTRs
Zarrella looked at over 200,000 Tweets containing links and found that the tweets with the highest CTRs were between 120 and 130 characters long, just shy of Twitters maximum 140 character limit.
I found this kind of surprising given the attention span of users on sites like Twitter – I figured the shorter the better but Tweets of this length could indicate that a link is more attractive when it’s accompanied by a short piece of text.
I’d guess that a comment or introduction to the link gives the impression that there actually is a human behind the Tweet and it’s not just a bot throwing out links.
Place links quarter way through your Tweet
In the same study Zarrella found that, out of the 200,000 Tweets, the highest CTRs could be found in the Tweets that presented the link around 25% of the way into the text.
So it if we make up a quick example (ignore the text, it might not make sense), Zarrella is saying that a Tweet formatted like this:
“Love this post [link link link]. Really informative article from @Serchen, everyone take a look.”
Would work better than a Tweet formatted like this:
“I’ve found a really informative article from @Serchen. Everyone take a look, I love this post [link link link].”
Mentioning other users and putting ‘RT’ gets a higher CTR
The result I found most interesting was how CTRs increased when Tweets contained certain words of phrases.
Tweets containing the terms ‘via’, ‘retweet’, ‘please’, and ‘check’ (as in ‘check this out’) had a higher CTR. As did Tweets containing mentions like @Serchen.
I made the assumption that Tweets that were essentially asking for Retweets (or begging for, if you’re cynical), would be perceived as slightly more spammy than those simply presenting information, but apparently not!
On a side note, I think the @mentions point is really important to implement because not only can mentioning other users instigate conversation, it can also add a little more personality to your Twitter and gain you more followers. (See more on Increasing your Twitter Followers).
(Note: Zarrella doesn’t specify which study this information came from, but if it was the 200,000 Tweets one then it’s a safe bet to say his results are pretty accurate.)
Schedule Tweets – CTRs higher on weekends
Another result that I found quite interesting is that Tweets posted over the weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) had a higher CTR than those posted throughout the week. It’s quite a significant rise too.
I figured most Twitter users would be using a mobile device of some sort and would have Twitter ‘on the go’ if you like. Either that, or those working on computers would be checking it throughout the day, but, again, apparently not! (This is why I love Zarrella’s studies).
I want to show you the graph as well so you can see just how significant the jump is for CTRs over the weekend:
This result is a good argument in favour of scheduling Tweets and using third party tools like TweetDeck or HootSuite. As long as you’ve got the content it only takes 2 minutes to schedule some Tweets so by the looks of things it’s definitely worth experimenting with.
Tweet in the afternoon – 3pm is good
If you are going to Tweet at the weekend, better make sure it’s after 2pm as CTRs seem to peak at 2pm, 5pm and 8pm. Unsurprisingly CTRs significantly dipped at 4am and 7am, but apart from that it looks like you could generally achieve a 0.5% CTR majority of the day.
There are a few more findings on the infographic but I thought these five would be the most useful, and like I said, the easiest to implement. You could even be really literal and write a Tweet 120 characters long, with a link 25% of the way through, ask for a Retweet and schedule it at 3pm on a Saturday. Let us know if you give any of these techniques a go!
If you want to see the full infographic you can find it here: http://danzarrella.com/infographic-how-to-get-more-clicks-on-twitter.html
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