Do more tweeted links mean fewer clicks?

TrendTracker tweeted something from SocialNetDaily the other day that raised a rather interesting point. Here’s my take on it.

The general jist is that, the more you tweet links, the fewer clicks you’ll get.

In a weird mathematical form it does make sense, in a very general way too (i.e covering a broad Twitter user base).
In theory, the more you tweet, and the more links you tweet, the fuller a person’s Twitter timeline becomes, the harder it is to follow you and what you’re saying , the less likely it is that you’ll be read and clicked. That is, if you’re not tweeting so much stuff that people unfollow you because you’re too busy ranting from your soapbox.

Theoretically, this is correct, and Dan’s charts do show that this can happen. However, there are many more considerations to factor in, especially with the user base that Twitter has.

Take one of my favorite Social Media Celebrities – Mr. Chris Brogan, he does Tweet rather a lot, I’m sure many of his followers follow many people, their Twitter timelines will be rather full, however Chris puts a lot of links out there and I’m sure he gets more than a few clicks on those links.

Yes, math comes into play, it’s simply not possible to see all that people tweet all the time.
The human part of Social Media comes into play too. Make a headline interesting and it’s likely to grab attention, put it out there at the right time (in general or relevant time for the reader) and you’ll get clicked and retweeted, if you engage and are interesting you’ll get clicks.

In the end, I think it’s all down to you. It’s all down to how you manage your twitter following (following and followers) and how you engage.

Keep who you follow managed, make sure they’re people you engage with and engage with you. Or are people who are relevant to you. If someone is just spewing junk that has nothing to do with you.. why are you following them? They’re filling your screen with noise and detracting from the people you want to listen to.

Manage how you tweet your links. Your followers don’t want to see nothing but links in your account. When they do see links, they want to see interesting ones. “Hey click this!..” does sometimes work but blind clicks aren’t always good clicks. Something like “@JustinKownacki spotted a good coffee shop map, here it is..” often works a lot better. This way you’re telling people what it’s about, where it came from and people searching Twitter for coffee shop maps are likely to pick up on it.

What do you think? do more tweeted links mean fewer clicks?

See Dan Zarrella’s article here