If you’re a Twitter user like me, you probably have a handful of news publications, organizations and blogs giving you updates every time they add content. Which, in many cases, is nice to have. It’s like a quicker and simpler RSS feed.
But if you’re like me, you also have certain publications, organizations and blogs that practically spam your feed. This can happen in one of at least two ways: 1) They constantly update with every little story that makes its way onto the Web, or 2) They wait until specific points during the day to shell out 15-20 tweets within a span of 2-3 minutes. There are more annoying ways this happens, I’m sure, but those, to me, are the most prominent.
Anyway, this sort of behavior, especially during a time where spammers frequently show up on Twitter, begs the question: Is this annoying splatter of information really all that effective in getting people to click your links?
A Grand Rapids Press copy editor, Todd Fettig, who happens to be my intern coordinator and a Central Michigan Life alum, conducted “experiments” throughout the day, using bit.ly’s tracking service given to users who sign up (for free). He tracked a comparison of how many people would click bit.ly links to a specific address when the Grand Rapids Press tweets it and when he tweeted it. He found comparable and sometimes bigger spikes in clicks when he tweeted a link than when the Press did.
(Before I go any further, do note that this is a very unofficial experiment. We have no way of truly knowing how many people are clicking The Press’ link, only how many are clicking Todd’s link, which bit.ly gives him)
I decided to conduct my own unofficial “Todd Fettig” experiment. I tweeted a link to an MLive story regarding taxes on beer, cigarettes and soda, a similar tweet that “michigannews” made about a half hour earlier. I used bit.ly’s Web site to create the link so I could track it later. Twenty minutes later, here was what I came up with:
Within a span of ten minutes after michigannews posted its link, 5 people clicked bit.ly links to go to the story. Within ten minutes of mine? 10.
That might not sound too drastic to you. But take into account that michigannews has more than 2,200 followers, compared to my 227 as of this posting.
So what’s my point?
If you’re a Twitter user, take a moment to reflect how you use it. You have news organizations shuffle links your way all the time. But how many times do you actually click their links? How many times do you find yourself clicking links and going to news stories because actual people are tweeting or retweeting them?
This scenario speaks volumes about today’s news and where we choose to get it in this information age but, for the sake of this post, let’s keep this in the Twitter realm. This calls forth how news outlets can maximize Twitter’s potential. Even with social media being as young as it is, we are programmed to look at news organizations’ Twitter feeds as simply news feeds rather than recommended reads. If you are one of these organizations, that is not necessarily a good thing. You want people clicking your links.
But when another one of our followers adds a human touch to those links, we tend to listen. We see value in those links, making it more enticing to give them that all-important click. That also makes it more enticing for a retweet, which gets even more people clicking.
Imagine the kind of power a news outlet can have on traffic if dozens of its employees built their own name brand within their community or audience, gathered sizable Twitter followings and spent even a small part of their day retweeting recommended links to stories on their publication’s site (without spamming). You will drive more traffic to a site that way than any automated news feed ever will.
Posted by Brian Manzullo at August 5, 2009
Journalism, Social Media