The Ultimate Measure of Twitter Influence: Average Clicks Per Link Posted

I have a pretty simple metric for how I measure engagement within Twitter and the growth of my own influence: average clicks per link posted. This shows me exactly what my reach is within Twitter when I share something.

Why is this the ultimate metric?

  1. Anyone can amass a couple thousand followers on Twitter — that’s nothing special (would someone please tell Matt Bacak?). Do your followers listen to you, engage with you, and look to you as a resource? Clicks per link is a concrete measure of the value you bring to your conversations.
  2. With URL shorteners, links in Twitter are blind — you can’t see the domain, so you don’t know if you’re clicking through to Google.com or VirusThatWillEatYourFilesAndSpamYourContacts.com. Clicking through a link that someone has posted to Twitter requires a certain degree of trust. (To be fair, most of the trust with regard to spam and malicious sites comes from the culture of the Twitter community itself.)
  3. Since most of your followers are also following hundreds if not thousands of other people as well, the majority of them are not going to see your Tweet as it goes flying by. So your average click per link posted is going to be a very small fraction of your followers (unless it gets re-Tweeted, etc). Guy Kawasaki has made the argument for Tweeting the exact same thing multiple times over the course of a day, to catch the people who missed it earlier, but that’s another discussion.
  4. Besides the trust and curiosity factors, more people are likely to follow a link you post if you’ve a) engaged them them in the past, and b) demonstrated previously that you link to stories/videos/pages of value (i.e. don’t just link to your own blog all day long).

To measure this (and a host of other information, I use a little-known URL shortener called Cligs (http://cli.gs/). I have been nothing short of thrilled with this tool. It tells me things like:  ”The last 100 cligs to get traffic got a total of 1574 hits.”

So I know that in the last few weeks (or however long it took me to post 100 links) I’ve gotten an average of 15.7 clicks per link posted.  This is up from a few weeks ago when I was around 13.5, so it would appear my influence is growing.

I can also see at a glance how my recent links have performed on Twitter:

…as well as a map (a la Google Analytics) of where the users clicking my links are coming from in the world…

…and how my link has propagated out through the interwebs (through retweets, search engines, etc):

With Cligs I always know what my influence is, up to the second. And I can at a glance the most important metric of all: average clicks per posted link.

(Full disclosure: I am in no way associated with Cligs — just a great tool I use dozens of times a day.)

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December 3, 2008 | Filed Under Social Media 

Comments

2 Responses to “The Ultimate Measure of Twitter Influence: Average Clicks Per Link Posted”

  1. Warren Sukernek on December 3rd, 2008 4:59 pm

    @scheuguy,

    Great points. I definitely agree that clicks per link is one of the best metrics to use in evaluating the impact of your tweet and resonates with the Twitterverse. I also consider the number of retweets that a link encourages to be important as well. Uh oh, I see a new blog post. Thanks for the inspiration.

    @warrenss

  2. @valagramonte on December 4th, 2008 9:48 pm

    Jamie,

    Great stuff here! Multiple tweets and re-tweets are the only ways that I see much of anything on twitter, as I most certainly don’t have a desk job!

    I try to squeeze my social media in whenever/wherever I can!

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