Yesterday (June 4), I sent out a tweet:
“Sign at BP gas station: ‘WARNING: Do Not Leave Pumps Unattended. You Are Responsible For Spills.’”
It included a link to a photo of a BP gas station sign, and the hashtag “#irony”.
It was quickly retweeted by a handful of my followers. And then by people I didn’t know. And then by whole lotta people I didn’t know! Wow!
I could see from the http://bit.ly/9uKmhG+ report that the link was getting clicked on. A lot. It’s at 1264 clicks as of June 5 4pm. (UPDATED STATS BELOW)
Now, it’s unusual for one of my tweets to get retweeted more than 5 times or have its link get more than 20 clicks. The all-time high had been maybe 150 clicks to non-original content (like the BP sign photo) and 40-50 clicks for original content (like this photo of a BP sign I took).
So this link was unusually popular for me, which I found interesting. Why did this happen? Also, would I get some sort of benefit out of all those retweets?
Obviously, it’s a great photo, so that’s huge. The content is good. I need to point out that I did not take the photo. Heck, I wasn’t even the one who discovered the photo first.
Yesterday morning, I saw the photo in my Tumblr Dashboard, posted by the “Public Radio International” Tumblr – they re-blogged it from Swirlspice (aka Erica Mauter), who saw the photo (taken by Mark and Vicki Cipolle) published on The Rachel Maddow Show Flickr page.
[SIDENOTE: I need to apologize to Swirlspice, because I always try to link to the original Tumblr, and for some reason I failed to see that Public Radio International had re-blogged her post. Not sure why I didn’t see that, but it was a mistake; Operator error. I figured it out after my tweet, but before I reblogged the photo myself.]
I shortened the link with my bit.ly account and composed a tweet – I typed up the words from the sign. Including the words from the sign, I think, was critical to spurning all the retweets and clicks.
About 3 months ago, I started adding as much of a concise description as possible in a tweet for content I link to. This offers the reader enough information to click or not to click, instead of being vague or mysterious. “Curiosity clicks” can be fun sometimes, and I suppose a tweet like this could have worked: “Ironic BP sign: http://bit.ly/9uKmhG”. But in this specific case, the words from the BP sign alone can carry the tweet’s impact – the photo is only needed to confirm the words. Maybe you don’t even need to click to see the photo?
However! Take a look at @pourmecoffee’s ambiguous tweet about the same picture:
That tweet got retweeted a lot as well. @pourmecoffee has 12,500+ followers, so that surely helps with retweets. But @pourmecoffee consistently has really great tweets and links, so their followers (myself included) can trust the link is going to be good stuff even if it’s a little vague. (Note, it’s difficult to see how many of those bit.ly url clicks came from @pourmecoffee’s link because they did not use a bit.ly account. Aggregated clicks for that url [http://bit.ly/dfOTei+] are at 7,242 clicks and counting.)
I wondered if all the retweets and clicks from my status update benefited me at all?
No, not so much. It looks like I gained 9 or 10 new followers, which is insignificant if you’re goal is to gain new followers (mine is not). I have had three twitter replies (here, here, and here), so not much interaction (I actually do like when I dialogue with people on twitter).
I suppose I could have first reblogged the post and then linked to my own Tumblr hoping for a boost in traffic, but that seems weak. Maybe it’s the “do your best and link to the rest” mantra I agree with. I’d rather see 1,000+ clicks to content I created, not something someone else made. In this specific case, I felt more like a distribution model than a publisher, and I’m okay with that.
How the propagation of content happens these days fascinates me. And this tweet about a BP gas station sign provided some first-hand insight for me, which was fun.
One other thing I noticed… some other blog posts are republishing the photo with commentary and they actually credit my tweet. Like this jalopnik.com post by Matt Hardigree. I don’t know if that’s a benefit or not, but it seemed kind of cool and kind of odd at the same time. Hardigree does the right thing and links direct tot he Flickr photo as well. Others don’t even bother to acknowledge sources, which is unfortunate.
Updates:
Update June 7 9am: 3,333 Clicks now for the http://bit.ly/9uKmhG+ shortened url. And Twitter reports 408 Retweets. However, I don’t think that includes “old school” retweets where someone does not use the Retweet button.
Also, I was surprised that that June 7 (Sunday) was the biggest day with 1,591 clicks. Original tweet was posted June 4.
