Using a Magnifying Glass for the Twitter Click Through Payoff

(MoneyWatch)  In my previous article about Apple, Skype, Kodak, Adobe, and others paying to have Twitter users pretend to use their products and services, there was one question I realized I didn't even consider. Companies are taking big risks to their brands and reputations to promote themselves through something that is no better than Belkin paying for reviews. But what are they getting out of it? A little research suggests that not only should the marketing people at those companies be smacked about by their CEOs for dangerous risk, but for taking risks without a significant reward, as hardly anyone uses the links.

Click through rate is an important metric in online marketing. Advertisers want to know that they are getting a good response for their investment -- a measure that has often been difficult to take in mass media. What click through does is convert almost any ad with a link into a direct marketing medium, because the ad asks the audience to take an action and measurements show how many did. Doing some web research to see what some people have learned about click through on Twitter is enlightening:

• Back in January, Mike Seidle did an experiment and found about a 4 percent click through rate with anywhere from 50 to 800 followers.
• In 2008, some Dutch entrepreneurs came up with a way to measure click through. In general, the lower the number of followers, the higher the click through rate. At 1,000 followers, the rate dropped to maybe 2 percent. If that pattern holds true, it makes you wonder what the rate would be for 20,000 or 30,000 or more followers.
• As consultancy Ciber found, tweets quickly lose their effectiveness, sometimes within ten minutes. Either the response is going to come right away, or the message gets lost in the drone.
• Some are reporting considerably lower click through figures.
• Dave Winer has tested his click through. At the time I'm writing his, he has something like 21,100 followers and his click through rate ranged from 3.4 percent to 0.41 percent.

As you can see, the numbers on click throughs are pretty widespread for this sort of thing. It makes you wonder how effective the Twitter ad campaigns might -- or might not -- be.

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