Matt Silverman

I have to admit, I am a little disheartened.  I was convinced that building a large Twitter following would at least give a great platform for promoting things.  I was always curious about numbers though.  If I posted a link, what % of my followers would actually click it?

http://twitpic.com/jlu6g – 62 views as of writing.  While I have a paltry 135 Followers, it seems that roughly 46% of them clicked on the link I posted.  Keep in mind, this view count is based off of pageviews to that page, so if one person viewed it multiple times it would count towards the same total.  So let’s make a more conservative estimate of 35% of my followers actually clicked the link.  Not too bad.

I still had envy for someone like Ashton Kutcher though.  Well, maybe not.  But I did have a little intrigue about his almost 4,000,000 followers on Twitter.

When he posts a link, if using my conservative estimate of 35% conversion ratio in clicks, that would mean he would get a whopping 1,400,000 clicks on every link he tweets.  Then again, 35% is a rather generous conversion ratio, what with all the spam accounts and all.  So let’s be VERY conservative.  10% conversion ratio.  Surely, at least 10% of the people “following” Ashton Kutcher are at least visiting the links he posts.  10% conversion ratio would be roughly 400,000 clicks.  That is still spectacular.  He is a marketing machine, right?  If only there was some way to actually see how many clicks his links get.

Oh, yeah, bit.ly.  That’s right, they offer pretty neat stats on every link shortened by them.  So I decided to look at some recent @aplusk data.

I made a typo right?  I wish I had.  It turns out that the links Ashton tweeted averaged 7,500 clicks per link.  This amounts to a shocking 0.19% percent conversion ratio.

The lesson?  Quality over quantity when it comes to a Twitter following.  If only .19% Ashton’s followers are clicking his links, at BEST 0.4% of his followers actually even read a word he says.