When you're picking, choosing, and crafting content to power your Twitter marketing efforts, it's easy to think that measurements like clickthroughs and retweets would both reflect "successful" or "engaging" content -- or insert your own unicorns-and-rainbows adjective there. "Remarkable," "worth sharing," and "interesting" all work well, too. But, as it often is, reality can be different than what feels true.
I looked at 2.7 million link-containing tweets and found something interesting: There is no correlation between retweets and clicks. In fact, 16.12% of the link-containing tweets I analyzed generated more retweets than clicks, meaning many people will retweet a tweet with a link without even clicking on that link. The data also emphasizes that the factors leading to a link-containing tweet being retweeted are sometimes different than the factors that lead to it getting clicked on. Below, you'll find an infographic detailing my findings.
How to Act on This Data
So what does all this mean? When you're planning your social media strategy, be clear about your goals for each tweet you put out there. Are you sharing your content to drive traffic to your website that you eventually want to convert into leads or customers? If so, then your goal should be get Twitter followers to click on the links in your tweets. A few ways to optimize your Twitter clickthrough rate is to experiment with link placement within your tweets, use between 120 and 130 characters in your tweets, and test publishing frequency, word choice, and timing.
On the other hand, if the goal of some of your tweets is, for example, to share content you've found across the web to become a thought leader and gain followers, then you'll probably want to optimize those tweet to generate retweets. In this case, asking for retweets with the phrase "please retweet" is one of the easiest ways to get more retweets. In fact, my research indicates that including "please retweet" in tweets generates 4x more retweets. For some other best practices for generating retweets, check out our article about "11 Guaranteed Ways to Get Others to Retweet Your Content."
Obviously most companies will do some of both, but be clear which is the highest priority every time you tweet.
Did any of this data surprise you? Are you consciously thinking about your goals for every tweet?
Image Credit: petesimon
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Alok Tiwari 2:16 PM on November 09, 2012
Two points:
Still RT matters as there are many crawlers depends on RT Counts.
And others applications that user had already signed up earlier will grab the RT data and link ....
Jonathan Thompson 2:21 PM on November 09, 2012
Thank you for taking the time to do this analysis. I will now make sure to analyze link-containing tweets for "retweets" and "clicks."
John 2:31 PM on November 09, 2012
Couldn't the difference in clicks and retweets be users with spyware programs that block the tracking of their clicks?
Patrick Belhon 2:32 PM on November 09, 2012
This is what I do, I retweets "good looking tweets" without clicking on it... Too bad! I'm sure I missing some of it, but my followers are happy.
Thanks for your great article
Dan Tyre 2:42 PM on November 09, 2012
Zarrella, is always johnny on the spot for this great information
Roger Poultney 2:47 PM on November 09, 2012
Have suspected this for quite a while - now here's hard evidence !
Tori 3:12 PM on November 09, 2012
Great Article. I actually do this. Sometimes I RT them to go back to later than never do or RT a news or sports article just for others that follow me.
Angela Goode-Taylor 8:02 PM on November 09, 2012
This article contains a wealth of great information. I can't wait to put into place the suggestions to get my followers to retweet my tweets.
Eric Groene 8:36 PM on November 09, 2012
I don't think that is a good change in the users behavior on twitter, because i would like my clients to click my link when i send them through twitter
Nader Mah 10:22 AM on November 10, 2012
I always have challenge with Dan's statistics because of his data pool. Which tweets? 2.7 million of random tweets or 2.7 million of HubSpot's tweets?
The data pool is matter!
what is the difference?
when I look at some ppl who have rewetted hubspot links, I can see they are retweeting everything from hubspot or it looks like they are retweeting randomly from hubspot account. Maybe they want to be popular in their local by retweeting some marketing companies efforts.
An automated system can retweet but cannot click!
Dan did not find any correlation between retweet and click but we can find a relation between hubspot twitter account and many other automated retweets.
Nader Mah
ColdAd inbound marketing company
Vince Koehler 11:01 AM on November 10, 2012
Unfortunately this data seems to reinforce the lack of substance of many who are trying to build following to show their influence vs. substance of influence that adds to the conversation.
Kinjal Shah 2:41 AM on November 11, 2012
Ouchhh. It debunks all the myth behind the correletion between higher RTs and CTR. Even, I often RT tweet without clicking on the link. I often tend to do that for well-known website. You may conduct a test on brand website. I'm sure they must have lower CTR compared to other website. Of course, they have higher number of RTs so they must be getting more traffic
Jithin Johny George 3:11 AM on November 11, 2012
great article, i had already thought of it... and not sure as it will be so...
i think it is same in the case of facebook share and likes
Nanny 6:00 AM on November 11, 2012
Yes, Many people doing re tweet and click without reading content. this is not effective to generate traffic. If you want to increase real traffic and really want to re tweet then read it carefully and then re tweet it.Website Design Canton Ohio
riyas 6:38 AM on November 11, 2012
Great post. Now a days many people are doing this
Jessica 4:17 PM on November 12, 2012
I have two things:
Of course people sometimes RT without clicking...if you're handling an account and basing success on the 'numbers', that's the game that some people play: quantity over quality.
Two, do you think this is capitalized upon by spammers? Create a really engaging title and hope people RT without clicking the link?
Jordi 9:28 AM on November 13, 2012
Thanks for doing this great research.
This is the reason why we use clicks as the main indicator of influence or relevance in http://karmacracy.com (as opposed to klout or similar ones).
Regards and thanks again,
Susan McHugh 10:22 AM on November 13, 2012
BUSTED! ;-)
SDGSteve 10:41 AM on November 13, 2012
Not all that surprised really, sometimes I read an article then tweet/retweet it later, or it's obvious what the link is about and you don't have time to read it (like the Baumgartner parachute jump) but want to share it. You can also look at it like some people use PPC advertising, it can just be branding, keeping you in people's minds.
Simplicissimus 5:53 AM on November 14, 2012
Uh, uh,…
There IS a significant relationship between clicks and retweets. Weak relationship but significant.
(the T-statistics is 1653 !!!, very usual with big samples, almost inevitable with N = 2,728,452 …)
Simplicissimus 6:00 AM on November 14, 2012
Oops ! real T-statistics value is 63.
Sorry…
Nick 2:53 AM on November 16, 2012
I'd suggest that one of the reasons for this is that there are a huge number of people trying to play the Twitter game that are struggling to find quality content to give themselves anything to Tweet about, and don't really care.
Personally I think that if an indepth survey of Twitter users was done, you would find a huge number of people that are using Twitter just because they want to be heard and seriously think that people are reading what they write about. I'd bet that a huge percentage of Tweets never get read by anyone and simply fall into this big black whole called "nothingness".