Where Links On Twitter Get Love

Where Links On Twitter Get Love

With over 200 million tweets sent per day, getting people to read your tweet is no easy feat.

Getting them to click on the links in your tweets is another challenge altogether and a matter of intense interest for brands, bloggers and websites eager to use the social media site as a source of traffic.

Dan Zarrella, a social media analyst for internet marketing company HubSpot, tracked 200,000 tweets in an effort to understand how the placement of a link in a tweet affects its likelihood of being clicked.

His analysis of these thousands of random tweets containing shortened, Bit.ly links uncovered a noteworthy relationship between the real estate occupied by a URL and its clickthrough rate in a tweet: "It turns out that the best area for clicks is about 25% of the way through the Tweet," Zarrella wrote in his blog post, which includes a "Twitter CTR [clickthrough rate] heat map.

Links posted at the very beginning of a tweet seemed to receive fewer clicks overall.

The art of driving clicks on Twitter is big business for companies that see the social media site as a potential traffic goldmine. According to Twitter statistics from 2010, a full 25 percent of tweets sent on Twitter contain links.

Though Twitter bills itself as an information network and has worked hard to court media companies, the social media site has some catching up to do: while Facebook has become a key source of traffic for media sites, Twitter "barely registers as a referring source," according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The research also found that the Drudge Report actually sent more traffic to news organizations than either Facebook or Twitter.

Another recent study performed by URL-shortening service Bit.ly examined the lifespan of a link posted on Twitter.

Bit.ly concluded that the average half life of a link shared on Twitter is 2.8 hours, meaning that after 2.8 hours, the link would have received half of the clicks it will ever get during its "lifetime." A link shared on Facebook has a slightly longer lifespan and has an average half life of 3.2 hours.

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