Twitter info July 2010
As we’ve had feedback that some of you are enjoying the insight and buzz posts, here’s a bit of info about the Ryan Seacrest Fan Zone twitter accounts.
Only a small number of people click on the links we tweet. If we post a link to @seacrestfanzone we can expect around 2% of followers to click on it on average (around 80 clicks). This drops to 1% (40) if the title makes the link sound as though it’s not specifically about Ryan, for example a link to American Idol news, and increases to around 3% (120) if we tag the link as photos or video. Hot topics, such as photos of Ryan’s recent vacation, get a 6% (240) click through. The word shirtless is a definite winner, which isn’t surprising as “Ryan Seacrest shirtless” is consistently a popular search term on the site!
We’ve been tagging links to pages on this site in a standard format, so people will hopefully realise they’re going to end up on the Ryan Seacrest Fan Zone if they click. These links get a slightly higher than average click through at just under 3% (120), which was unexpected as we did it that way in case auto posting links to our own blog was irritating.
Links to Ryan’s website get a lower than average clickthrough at 1.5% (unless we tweet within a few minutes of the post going up or use a vastly different title) and we generate virtually no clicks on retweets of @RSP and @RyanSeacrest. We assume that everyone following us is already following Ryan and RSP (and checking his site), so retweets of these accounts are of no benefit to our followers, but they may have small significance to the retweeted accounts when certain twitter rankings and analytics are calculated so we still retweet, albeit sparingly.
Until a couple of months ago, our average click through rate was closer to 1%. We’ve done two things that seem to have caused the increase. The first is switching to a personalised URL shortener [rsfz.co.uk]. For reasons unknown to us, average click throughs increased to around 1.5% as soon as we started using it. The second increase came when we added a comment alongside the links, to give information about the article or why we thought it might be interesting.
We thought commenting links could go either way, as telling people who want to grab a quick overview of a lot of topics wouldn’t need to click through if we say what the article is about, but it seems there are more people who don’t click unless they know what they’re getting. People click on silly teaser headlines too with some of our highest click throughs back to the blog coming from obvious bait titles such as ‘Ryan wants to eat bugs from a pan’.
Follower count grows slowly on @seacresfanzone. The attrition rate is fairly low too, but we tend to lose followers faster than we gain them if we post a lot of links about RSP shows or retweet too many comments, so it looks like it works best for people when we keep the focus mainly on Ryan news.
We gain followers faster on @ryanradiofans, but this is no doubt because we follow back. The account doesn’t lose a huge amount of followers considering it’s high volume at times, but there’s a small drop off of new followers during the Monday radio show, and we lost a few people when Ryan returned after his vacation — presumably the sudden wave of tweets is a shock to recent followers.
We’ll give you the July site buzz later in the month, but unless something major happens in the next week or so, this month’s mostly about Ryan’s vacation and Larry King Live.
