How to Improve the Click-Through Rate of Your Tweets – Coast TV

Here at Coast Digital we are keen on sharing knowledge, and as a result of that we’re pleased to announce the launch of Coast TV. Coast TV is a video channel where members of the Coast Digital team will be sharing their best practice tips from across the digital landscape; covering everything from SEO to website design.

In our first video of the series we’re looking at how you can improve the click-through rate of the links you’re sharing on Twitter. If you have any questions or feedback then we’d love to hear it in the comments below.

Tools Referenced in Video

• Google’s URL Shortener
• Google’s URL Builder
• Guide To The New Google URL Builder

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to the first in a series of videos from Coast TV where we’re going to be looking at answering your questions and sharing our knowledge with you on digital marketing.

So let’s kick off with our first question here which is “How can we help you improve your click-through rate from the links you’re sharing on Twitter?”, and to begin to look at this we want to look at the difference between Facebook and Twitter. Now when you share a piece of content like a link on Facebook, the visibility of that is actually determined by an algorithm called EdgeRank. Whereas in comparison on Twitter, it’s completely public – there are no filters or algorithms there which determine who sees that. All of your followers will see that Tweet come up in their timeline when you tweet it. So the real big factors that dictate the CTR on that tweet then are the time you’re sending it, whether that be not just the time of the day, but in fact perhaps the day of the week as well will affect that. The second element is going to be the actual content you’re sharing, so what sort of calls to action are you including in your tweets? What are you using in there that’s going to entice people to click and share your content and your links? And the answer to improving that is to test – test it again and again, in fact you should never stop testing. Try different days of the week, try testing different calls to action and things like that, but what’s most important here is that we’re accurately measuring how these are improving, how these tests we’re running are improving to make these educated decisions on what’s working and what’s not working, and to do that we’re going to recommend 2 tools to you.

The first one is Google’s URL shortener – goo.gl which you might see in this mock-up tweet here. There are plenty of URL shorteners out there but this one is beneficial because it ties in with your existing Google account which you’re probably already using for Google Analytics, and the great thing is this gives a mini dashboard of how that URL is performing, such as how many clicks it’s received, at what time of the day it’s received those on those days, and it also gives you a geographical overlay as well of where in the world they’ve clicked it, so it might help if you’re trying to get clicks from a particular nationality, if it’s targeted content.

The second tool we’re going to recommend is Google’s URL builder, which basically adds a custom tag to your URL and it’s most popularly used in Email marketing I’d say – you might send an email out with an email campaign, and it will have several links to the same page, but what we can do with the URL builder is custom tag each of those URL’s individually so not only can we tell that people clicked through from that email, but we can also see which link on that email users clicked on, which was the most popular link in there, and we can use that information for future email campaigns. And the same applies to social media and Twitter as well, and the benefit here is an additional one with Twitter – when people find your link beneficial or find it of use, they may not use the same URL shortener when they re-share it or retweet it, and instead they’ll use their own URL shortener, however if we can add that custom tag to the end of the URL when they click on it, hopefully they’ll copy that into it too and we’ll still be able to measure the result of that tweet we’ve sent in Google Analytics.

So really that’s all there is to it – if you have any questions or queries, please let us know below, other than that, thanks for listening to the first edition of Coast TV, and we hope to see you again soon!