On Monday, I asked Twitter users to complete a very short survey. They answered questions about how many followers they had, and how many clicks a link received when they shared it using a service like Bit.ly.
I asked because I wanted to get a sense of the clickthrough rate for links shared on Twitter. I received about 45 responses. Not enough to qualify as statistically significant, but a good start nonetheless.
To get the average clickthrough rate, I just divide the total number of clicks reported (1656) by the total number of followers reported (46973). That gives us a rate of 3.5%. This means that, on average, a link shared on Twitter will be clicked by 3.5% of your followers.
As you might expect, there’s a relationship between the total number of followers and the clickthrough rate. For those with less than 800 followers, the clickthrough rate is 8.6%. For those with more than 800 followers, the rate falls to just 2.5%. This make sense. If you have a small group of followers, you probably have a closer relationship, on average, with each of them. They’re likelier to click links that you share.
Thanks to those who participated in the survey. If you’d still like to contribute, take 18 seconds and do so.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Interesting Numbers Darren!
Are you making any allowance for the bots trolling twitter? http://tr.im reports a fair number of those.
Nope, it’s a pretty unsophisticated survey. How do you think I’d make allowances for bots?
Are the bots trolling in real time, or after the fact (like search engine spiders)? I ask because, as it happens, 3.5% is almost exactly the rate that personal Twitter sees. I’d assume that those were all humans clicking immediately after I post a link, but maybe not.
It would be interesting to find out if there’s a correlation between the number of followers your followers have, and the click through rate (i.e., if all your followers follow a lot of people, chances are they might have not even seen your tweet).
Let me know if you do any more Twitter stats — I might be able to hack out some Twitter API code to grab some stats.
Just did something a little similar, looking at the tweets from different brands, the “active” followers, and an implied click-through rate – found the same 1-3.5% range: http://www.voncoelln.com/eric/2009/06/03/after-the-tweet-exploring-twitter-click-through-rate-benchmarking-to-measure-engagement/
Thanks for that. Always nice to be validated. I suspect that when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of followers, the clickthrough rate would fall to 1% or lower.
Great post. Useful research. I hope you go on to do more such work with a larger sample base.