Dan Zarella is at it again with what is probably his most robust infographic to date. “How To: Get More Clicks on Twitter” (pictured below) culls through more than 200,000 tweets to reveal the factors that actually get people clicking on the material you tweet. In other words, these are the Twitter optimization tips that could bring more people to your website. As you read through the infographic feel free to see the accompanying analysis I’ve written to help Twitter newbies turn this data into traffic.
How often should you tweet?
According to Zarella’s study of 20 highly followed Twitter accounts, the best way to get click throughs on your website is to tweet about once per hour. Hit your followers with much more than that and click through rates drop dramatically.
What’s Paper.li?
You’ll see in the infographic below that tweets containing the words “daily is out” have a 30% higher click through rate than tweets without those words. Here Zarella is referring to tweets automatically generated with a system called paper.li. Paper.li lets anyone create their own daily paper with just a few clicks.
Users usually create papers on specific topics of interest, curating their favorite stories throughout the day. The final product reads like a mini paper that links out to the full stories that the publisher has curated. At any point the publisher can then tweet an automatically generated message that says something like, “The [name of your daily publication] is out. Featured stories by @username @username and @username.” (Where username is the source for where you’ve gotten featured stories.)
In my opinion it’s a combination of curation and vanity that increases the click through rate on these tweets. The hand-curated news useres publish on paper.li give people access to filtered news while the featured @username people just can’t help but take a glimpse at what was interesting to you.
The Timing of Tweets
Zarella also sees a correlation between high click through rates and tweets published on the weekends and later in the day. This could correlate with tweeting when people have more time to actually pay attention to your content.
Have any other questions about tweeting or the infographic in general? Feel free to ask in the comments section.
