10 words and phrases that can help or harm your Twitter click through rate

After compiling a dataset of more than 200 000 link-containing tweets to generate a Click Through Rate (CTR) heatmap, I decided to dig into what words, phrases and characters correlate with higher (or lower) CTR. Below are my findings. And yes, I know correlation isn’t causation, but to quote Edward Tufte: “It sure is a hint.”

The first “word” I analysed was the hashtag. I found that there is very little difference in the CTR of a link whether it is accompanied by a hashtag or not. They don’t seem to hurt or help.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I found is that Tweets that contained the words “daily is out” (which is the signature of the paper.li automated Tweets) had much higher CTRs than tweets that did not. It turns out, paper.li works, at least for driving clicks.

I also found that Tweets using the word “via” as a method of retweeting had a higher CTR.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Tweets specifically directed at a person tend to have a higher CTR since I’m much more likely to pay attention to a tweet if it’s sent to me. This is probably the reason the paper.li Tweets do so well, they tend to contain three @-mentions.

Like the “via” retweeting syntax, Tweets with “RT” in them had a higher CTR than those that did not.

My data seems to indicate that when you politely ask people to do something, like a nice social call-to-action, they’re likely to do it.

Again, specifically asking readers to check out a link seems to result in a higher CTR than not doing so.

Now we get to the words that correlated with lowered CTRs. The first one I found was “@addthis” which is a signature for the tweets that come from the automated AddThis sharing functionality.

Tweets that mention the word marketing have a lower CTR than tweets that don’t mention it. Most marketers won’t be surprised by this.

The automated tweets that come from the entertainment-based social network GetGlue‘s system have a lower CTR than tweets that don’t come from that system.