What Happens When A Celebrity Links You On Twitter?
A funny thing happened to me at the weekend: something I wrote on Freaky Trigger, a little piece about the band Fall Out Boy, was linked to on Twitter by FOB member Pete Wentz.
Now, you may not know or care who Fall Out Boy are, but Wentz is (according to Twitterholic ) the 32nd most followed person on the site. So obviously - as well as being quite exciting! - this caused a bit of a traffic spike.
Independently, I read this interesting post by Simon Kendrick about the CTR (Click Through Rate) he’d experienced when a post of his had been retweeted a few times. It inspired me to try a similar calculation for the Wentz repost.
Pete Wentz has 1,492,000 followers on Twitter, give or take a thousand. According to Google Analytics, my blog post has had 5,974 hits since I put it up on Friday morning.
Looking at the previous post I put up, about 250 of those hits might have been expected anyway from my regular readers (thanks regular readers!). So 5,724 are via Pete Wentz. Massively more than I’d usually expect, but -
That’s a click through rate of 0.004%. Not exactly high. Now, as Kendrick points out, only a fraction of anyone’s followers will see a given Tweet. Let’s say a fifth of Wentz’ saw it: that takes us to a mighty 0.02%.
I’m well aware that it’s sheer folly to try and generalise from one single data point. But on the other hand, I’m unlikely to get linked to by any other celebrities in a hurry. So allow me to at least form a few hypotheses:
1. Celebrity links don’t necessarily move the needle much: Those extra 5,700 hits were great to have and I am very grateful that Wentz enjoyed my (TBH somewhat confused) review, but the CTR was surprisingly low.
Maybe my content was to blame? Well, this was from a band’s songwriter endorsing a description of a review as “particularly interesting” with no other context. So if the content was crap, they’d only have found that out after clicking! I think the point is that celebrities aren’t generally seen as content providers: that’s not their role in the network.
2. Followers don’t equal fans: The low CTR also suggests to me that the number of people following Pete Wentz because he’s a celebrity is a great deal larger than the number following him because of WHICH celebrity he is, i.e. what he actually does. This is sort of obvious, but has interesting implications viz…
3. Celebrities areas of influence aren’t always clear: I wonder what would have happened if I’d posted a kitten picture and (for some mad reason) Wentz had linked to that. Same amount of extra hits? More? Fewer? If what’s being followed is celebrity-ness rather than specific achievement then perhaps what they do for a living is largely irrelevant to how much traffic they channel and to what.
4. Celebrity Tweets have a longer afterlife: From looking at what typically happens my content is linked to, I see a fairly typical pattern - a very short burst of hits, rapidly dwindling, and then nothing. For the Wentz tweet I also saw this but with a gentler slope: I got more than 1/4 of the hits from Wentz’ Twitter the day after the Tweet - it was still being looked at.
This suggests to me that a big proportion of the followers treat the singer’s feed more like a blog - something to be browsed on its own, rather than experienced as part of a stream. (The feed is also linked to from petewentz.com, which supplied about 10% of the hits).
But like I say, these are hypotheses and that’s one datapoint. Make of it what you will.
(One final bit of information: out of the 5,700 extra hits I got 10 or so extra comments. Which, as usual, I especially enjoyed.)
