What makes people click a link in Twitter?
I keep banging on about the importance of the headlines in your blog and how they have to be punchy, relevant and make people want to click them.
I’ve also talked about Twitter and how it’s best to treat it as a micro-blog. When you tweet something on Twitter, you’re basically applying the same principles that you apply when you’re writing a headline for you blog.
Twitter is great for driving traffic to your website but if you’re going to tweet your own site in the hope of getting people to come to it then you need to surround it with text that’s going to make people want to click on it.
Because examples are often easier to understand than a load of theory, I’ve kept a list of the tweets I’ve clicked in Twitter this morning and I’m going to explain why I clicked on them. Hopefully it’ll provide some insight into what makes a good tweet and keep you understand what you should be aiming to do with your own tweets (at least if you want ME to click on them - it might not work for anyone else!).
One thing to bear in mind is that most of these people have a head start because I respect them, they talk about things that are in my domain and they generally provide good interesting links. They don’t tweet their own stuff all of the time (or if they do then I don’t notice it!), so I’m more likely to click on something that they tweet.
Source: http://massmediadesign.co.uk/blog/archive/2008/05/23/twitters-links-that-i-had-to-click.aspx
