Stop, you’ve been tweeting all wrong. This is how you do it
Very interesting post from Dan Zarrella who has been analysing where in a tweet is the best place to put the all important link. Will it be a surprise to learn that we have all been putting it in the wrong place?
It was for me. Most tweets you see, if they include a link, include the link at the end of the tweet. That always seemed the natural place to put it right? Apparently while that might feel intuitively correct it is not the best place for it go to at all.
He looked at the data for 200,000 random bit.ly-link-containing tweets and then using the bit.ly API he calculated a click through rate (clicks on a link divided by number of followers of tweeter).
He then looked at where the link was in the tweet to its CTR and created this heat map below where the entire map symbolises a tweet. The dark red bars represent a position with a high click through rate whereas light-red or white have much lower rates of click through.
“It turns out that the best area for clicks is about 25% of the way through the Tweet. Do these findings match your experience? Will you be experimenting with this placement?” asks Dan Zarrella.
There’s also a very interesting comment on the piece as well where someone asks:
“The Tweets I’ve seen where people consistently position the URL in the optimum range announce the particular type of content contained. Examples: ”NEW STUDY: <url> blah blah blah” or ”FUNNY VIDEO: <url> blah blah blah.” I wonder if that Tweet construction is just as important (or more) as link position to your CTR numbers.”
Don’t know about you, but I think it has to be worth experimenting.
All Comments
Do we know if the analysis only measured Tweets that had copy either side of the URL?
Or is it that short Tweets with a URL at the end get the most traffic?
Has it taken all that analysis to realise something we have been doing for over 2 years. I think people who need and want the best advice should speak to my head of digital jon@spaceandtime.eu.com
I might be being naive, but to me there’s no magic science in it – I agree with Gordon’s last point. Stands to reason that if someone you follow comments on a link “This is really insightful>[link][descriptor]you’re more likely to read it. Having the link separate the comment from the descriptor makes it more obvious which text is which, so I think that tweets will frequently be constructed this way.
When I shared this very interesting article on Twitter, the link was at the end, which made me smile.
[...] This week we read about a post from Dan Zarrella who has been analysing where in a tweet is the best place to put the all important link and was surprised to learn that it’s not at the end as people often imagine. [...]
[...] insights into where best to place links in Tweets to maximise click through rates was the focus of a recent study by Dan Zarrella. Sampling 200,000 bit.ly links, Zarrella created a [...]
[...] who has done some more research into how we can all get more clicks out of our tweets. He did some research on this last year when he analysed where in a tweet was the best place to put the [...]