Wondering how to get your followers to respond to your tweets? It may not be as hard as you think. With a few tweaks, you can increase your click-through rates substantially.

The clickthrough rate (CTR) equates to the number of clicks on a link divided by the number of followers. The higher the clicks, the higher your CTR.

As a former chemist, I like to see the results of scientific data instead of relying on word of mouth predictions that are shaky at best. Since entering the world of internet marketing and content writing, while I appreciate the myriad of opinions, I value some scientific data to back them up. You can take the scientist out of the lab, but you can’t take the lab out of the scientist.

Dan Zarrella, cleverly named “The Social Media Scientist”, has taken the guesswork out of social media and applied the scientific method to his testing. He tests metrics and releases the results via colorful infographics.

His recent test measured tweet CTRs which revealed some interesting trends. He analyzed more than 200,000 tweets and presented the information graphically. Here is a summary of what he found:

Length of Tweets

While Twitter allows140 characters per tweet, the ideal tweet will contain fewer characters. Dan found that the highest CTRs occurred with tweets containing between 120 – 130 characters.

It can be hard to compose sound bytes of valuable information in 140 characters, never mind 120. Thankfully, the short tweets (<100 characters) were less successful so you can hold off on chopping your tweets for now.

Don’t use this as a hard-fast rule. If you have something groundbreaking to say in less than 120 tweets, then by all means do it. Use these points as guidelines.

Links

Dan analyzed whether link placement affected CTRs. His data shows the highest impact when links are placed 25% of the way through the tweet.

 

This data seems to coincide with normal internet user habits. Attention spans are nonexistent for internet users and links placed at the end may not make the grade.

Does this mean that a link should accompany every tweet? Definitely not. In fact, Dan tested this (see next image). Play around with the links in your tweets and notice your CTRs when you change their position.

Dan also found that the number of links can affect CTRs.

Word Use

Tweets containing the words or symbols “via”, “@”, “RT”, “please”, and “check” enjoyed higher CTRs than tweets void of the same words. Tweets containing the words “@AddThis”, “@GetGlue”, and “Marketing” performed worse than tweets void of the same words.

Amazingly, some words increased CTRs by more than double and triple.

 

The new automatic “re-tweet” button makes it easier to re-tweet, but it excludes the letters “RT”. Re-tweet the traditional way or share the content with @via and the originator’s name and see if you notice any increase in engagement.

Paper.li

Paper.li is an online content aggregation system. Daily posts include the words, “daily is out.” Dan found these words to have the greatest positive effect on CTR—more than all of the other words he tested.

 

I have not used Paper.li but would be interested to hear if anyone has noticed an increase in CTR as a result. Please post in the comments below if you are using it.

Verbs and Adverbs

Time to dust off the cobwebs and go back to 3^rd grade English. Tweets with adverbs and verbs garnered higher CTRs.

What is an adverb? Remember when your teacher told you that any word ending in”ly” is an adverb? Use colorful adverbs before your verbs to give them emphasis. Consider these two statements:

#1 – Businesses are becoming more aware of the benefits of internet marketing

#2 – Businesses are progressively becoming more aware of the benefits of internet marketing

Statement #2 adds a little more personality and intrigue. Try it and see how it works for you.

Tip: Tell your audience what to do with your verbs…”Take a look” at this article, or “Check out” this article.

Tweet Times

When is the ideal time to tweet? Dan found Friday, Saturday and Sunday to be the ideal times to tweet. Also, tweets posted later in the day enjoyed higher CTRs than tweets posted earlier.

This data is a general guideline. Test your tweets to determine the best time for your specific target audience. This data may work for the masses, but if your audience is stay-at-home mothers or night shift workers, you can see where this may need to be altered.

The Bottom Line

This data is certainly helpful, but each business will need to discover its own unique formula. CTRs are not the only measurable data points. Some stats cannot be measured, like what tweet caused someone to search for your name in Google or what post struck a chord with a potential lead who did not click a link. Not every tweet will contain a link and some may move a lead one step closer to working with you regardless of whether he/she took a measurable action.

Can you think of any more data points that would be helpful to measure?

Source

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Social networks for business are now essential for companies to stay competitive. As the use of the mobile Internet grows, people are online more than ever as they can connect from any location with Wi-Fi, or 3G/4G access.

Business social networks can help companies reach out to new customers and to keep in contact with existing ones. Many companies use social media for customer support and for gauging reaction to newly introduced products.

Here is our list of the 10 best social business networks.

1. Facebook

Although not specifically focused on business users, Facebook is the world’s largest social website. Almost all large corporations have a presence on Facebook and many companies have multiple pages on this platform. The idea on Facebook is to interact regularly with your community of friends to include existing customers and people interested in your company.

2. Twitter

Twitter is also not specific for business use, but it is too big for companies to ignore. Twitter differs from Facebook in that the format only allows short status updates similar to those used for texting. For this reason, Twitter is popular with young people that grew up with texting. Many celebrities use Twitter to reach out to fans and companies are increasingly turning to the site for customer and technical support.

3. LinkedIn

This site is specifically for business people and professionals. LinkedIn is a perfect platform for companies looking to hire new employees and contractors or to find partners and investors. The platform is less appropriate for outreach to customers or potential customers unless you have a business-to-business organization.

4. YouTube

The video hosting website offers companies a great vehicle for offering multimedia productions in video format. For example, you could produce videos that highlight products or that demonstrate how to use products. YouTube provides businesses with a free platform for publishing TV-like advertisements. However, for your videos to get watched, you will need to expand your social network so people can find your links.

5. Flickr

Flickr is a photo hosting website that allows you to upload pictures of your products, business property, employees, events, etc. You can best employ this website together with other platforms on your business social network list like Twitter.

6. StartupNation

Startups can use this website to connect with other entrepreneurs that are launching new businesses. The site offers many services including seminars, podcasts, blogs, forums and articles focused on the subject of starting up a business. The site also offers competitions that act as incubators for new business ideas.

7. PartnerUp

As the name implies, this platform is for the business social network list of those looking for new partners. Whether you are seeking new investors or contractors to help with specific jobs, this network allows you to specifically ask others for the services or resources that you need. Users can also offer advice on how to find new partners and investors. PartnerUp is more for small and medium-sized businesses and they have a Resource Directory for placing ads and RFPs.

8. Klout

The Klout website is more about measuring your social influence online, but it also has direct social networking functions. As a Klout member, you can discover the reach of your social marketing campaigns along with the influence of your social community. This is a great way to see whether your efforts are working although it does not offer any method for measuring ROI in dollar terms. You can increase your social clout by interacting with other Klout users including providing recommendations for others based on their fields of expertise. The idea is to get friends in your network to reciprocate and recommend you as well.

9. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is a crowd-sourcing social platform. Many business social networks cater specifically to other businesses and professionals looking for services. At Mechanical Turk, you can find people offering to perform a wide range of tasks for a fee. Amazon takes a 10 percent commission on all transactions.

10. Google+

In the future, Google+ may rank higher on the list of the best social business networks, but for now, people are still watching the new platform. Google has tried many times before to break into social media in a big way, but with limited success. The new site is very much like Facebook, but it offers ways to group friends into different “Circles” for easier management and interaction.

With this list of social networks for business, you will be well on your way to establishing a strong social presence on the Internet. Remember that effective social networking requires that you interact with your online community on a regular basis. Stale social media pages become practically useless. By providing your friends, fans and other community members with regular updates and content they will come to look for news from you consistently.

Learn how to post information on your products or services, or just any news that pertains to your business. For example, a sporting goods store could post interesting news articles from the sports world so that friends come to expect such stories.

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We all know that we should be engaging in social bookmarking and social marketing for our online businesses in some way, but just as the over-abundance of marketing activities can be overwhelming, simply finding and identifying social bookmarking sites that are worth our time and effort can be daunting.  Your time is valuable to you and cannot be spent on activities that add little to no value to your online business, and as such, finding quality do-follow social bookmarking sites that will actually help your search rankings is often thrown to the site in favor of more immediate and apparent pressing needs.
This article will try to help you sift through this often dull and unrewarding task.  First, we will identify a handful of social bookmarking sites (not all will be of interest to your site directly).  More importantly, we will show why and how these are valuable so you can identify social bookmarking sites that work well for you.  Next we will offer a few good tools that you can use to automate your social bookmarking activities (this is the REALLY important step).

First, A Few Sites to Focus On

What makes a good social bookmarking target?  Most people engage in social bookmarking for one of two reasons: 1) either they want the SEO benefit that social bookmarks can provide, or 2) they hope to generate a following from their social bookmarking activities.  Ideally we would focus on both, but the reality is that not every page we publish or article we write will have a viral effect.  In addition, the SEO benefit of social bookmarks, while still important, can be deprecated due to the high amount of abuse and automation.
With that in mind, here are 15 social bookmarking sites, so do-follow and others no-follow. You do not need to use each of these, but rather use this list as a guide for how to qualify a good social bookmarking site.

1. Google+. The reason for this should be obvious.  As much as many of us groaned at the thought of another social network to become current on, Google+ is making it more and more difficult to ignore them.  In fact, they are nearly making it impossible by integrating themselves into their search results.  Add to the fact that getting +1′s is now a factor in their search algorithm, Google+ offers a compelling reason to become a part of their social network.
2. Twitter.  This as well should be no surprise.  Twitter is a bit of an odd social network in that they have remained relatively consistent and simple over the past few years.  While Facebook seems intent on overtaking our lives, Twitter is content with being the micro-blogging platform that offers website owners thousands of low-value links and the possibility of becoming viral quickly.
3. Delicious.  Delicious is one of the gradfather’s of the social bookmarking scene.  Although its popularity has dropped over the past several years in light of other mediums rising to prominence, this is still a great site to keep in your arsenal.
4. StumbleUpon.   StumbleUpon, like Twitter, has stayed remarkably true to its roots and to its original intent.  StumbleUpon gives website owner’s the ability to have their site indexed in a well managed category system which can be helpful.  In addition, the traffic from SU seems to have some staying power to it.
5. Pinterest.  Pinterest is the up and comer on this list.  The growth of Pinterest is well documented, as is the linking power that this site can throw your way.
6. Buzzflash.  This is one of many niche social bookmarking sites.  This is a site for political news, blog posts, and the like. Niche blogs like this are highly valuable. This is also a “do follow” social bookmarking site.
7. Reddit. Reddit originally started out as a site geared more towards tech heads, but in the past few years they have expanded and allowed anyone to start up a niche Reddit channel.  Once again, this provides you with the best of two worlds: high PR and powerful site along with the power of niche specification.
8. Fark.  Fark is one of the older social bookmarking sites and has proven itself to stay editorially true over time.  This site is geared towards news stories and releases.
9. Chictini. Chictini is a bookmarking site geared towards women and specifically towards fashion.  Do follow niche sites like this are a powerful tool in your overall set of sites you use.
10. Look for more…you can find a nice list of niche sites here.

Social Bookmarking Automation – Tools and Tips

Before we get into this section, allow me to first offer this warning: automating your social bookmarking is nearly required, but it can easily be used in the wrong way thus invalidating any work you put into it.  Social bookmarking is an activity that is easily “gamed” by automation software and unfortunately it is rather easy to identify when it has been “gamed”.  The goal with social bookmarking is to appear as natural as possible.  When using automation software, your goal should be the same is it would be if you were to do your bookmarking by hand.  A proper social bookmarking campaign will result in improved search engine rankings as well as real visitors to your site.

With that said, here are three tools worth looking into:

• SocialAdr.com – SocialAdr.com uses the power of crowdsourcing to generate a very natural link profile and bookmarks to your pages.  They offer both a paid version and a free version, however, for the overworked online business owner, the paid version is highly worthwhile.  With 1-2 minutes per day you can get your site bookmarked across literally thousands of sites from real bookmarking accounts at a natural pace.  Currently SocialAdr uses 21 bookmarking sites which is certainly a good number, but most importantly, those sites are kept updated on a regular basis.  This is by and far the easiest system we have used.
  
• Bookmarking Demon – If one were to describe Bookmarking Demon in a word it would be “powerful”.  This software gives you an incredible amount of flexibility, automation, and distribution power.  The number of options you have as a marketer are astounding.  The product of this power, however, is naturally some level of complexity.  Learning how to use Bookmarking demon does take a bit of time, and configuring it properly will also take time.  Fortunately they have provided a free guide, or you can also buy this tutorial which is quite comprehensive and will help you guard against those things which could trip up your campaign.
  
• Social Submitter – the folks over at SEOTools have developed a nice little piece of software that allows you to accomplish much of the same things as Bookmarking Demon, but without the same level of complexity. Naturally this does limit your options a bit, but if you are looking for a happy medium between SocialAdr and BookmarkingDemon, then this may warrant a look.

Social Bookmarking Sites – Properly Done, Proper Results

For any person who publishes content on a regular or semi-regular basis, social bookmarking sites can be a fantastic ally for your efforts. Social bookmarking sites help round out an overall SEO picture, can give you exposure which generates additional external links, and are very good at driving long-tail keyword results in the search engines.
But social bookmarking is time consuming.  To that end, work smart, choose where you will submit, and automate as much as possible.  Then focus on the other parts of your business that require more of your time!

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