I’ve been wondering lately about Twitter. I wonder when I send a tweet to my 800 followers, who is actually paying attention not only reading my tweet, but clicking on the link I provide. In reality, it seems to me that we only have a small window of opportunity to be “noticed” or else the tweet just gets buried in the time line.
My guess was that any tweet has a “shelf life” of roughly 2 hours, and assuming about 5% of your followers are considered to be “active followers” (meaning they usually respond to things you post or at least consistently read them), I could expect about 20 click-throughs to the link I provided in my tweet.
The Test
I sent a post at 1:38p CST (right in the middle of the day, when hopefully most are actively using Twitter) entitled “Test: How I Evaluated the Effectiveness of Print Ads: http://bit.ly/19GkSz”; a blog I posted on this site on April 21st. I used bit.ly to track the results, thanks to my friend @bolora. I was using BudURL and was getting frustrated with it, so Bo said to try bit.ly and by inserting “/info” right after the .ly, I would get a full report on clicks, etc.
The Results
Right after the tweet posted, it was re-tweeted by friends @erikdarm (678 followers) at 1:53p, and then 2 of his followers re-tweeted the post; @blellowj (2,047 followers) at 1:54p and @stephenlynch (712 followers) at 1:57. It is now 3:19p and there have been no further re-tweets, so the pass-along value may have reached its limit within the Twitter time line.
Total reach = 4,235 potential Tweeple to read and click on my tweet (my 798 followers, plus the followers of the re-tweets).
If you go to the bit.ly link, you will see a screen like the one below:
So the “Now” screen looks like this and refreshes every few seconds, so the time line keeps moving to the right. (It would be cool if you could go back and see the clicks at the beginning – there was more activity around 2:00p with one time about 6 clicks came in simultaneously).
I think it’s safe to say the post has now exhausted it’s useful life, with the last click at 2:41p CST (it is now 3:29p and no click activity since then).
This shows the activity for the “full day”, with a total of 34 clicks at the 2:00p mark, and 15 at the 3:00p mark for a total of 49 clicks to the link in the tweet (i.e. 49 potential new visitors to our blog/website).
Conclusion
We would have to do several tests to prove this out, and I’m sure would vary if you were Robert Scoble or Guy Kawasaki, but in general (for the rest of us), from this small experiment we conclude that a “useful” tweet has the following characteristics:
-a shelf life of about 1 hr 15 min, and then it “dies”
-1 to 2% click-through rate on links
Which means that this is not a whole lot different than direct mail for example, without out the cost of course. What do you think? Is Twitter really a good way to communicate and share useful knowledge, or is it simply getting lost in the mix?
