Statistics On Social Are Great For Reach, Not For Clicks
Numbers and statistics are awesome. They quickly convey data-backed information in an easily consumable way. Sharing stats is a great way to increase engagement on social too. According to Twitter, messages that contain a number increase retweets by 17%. This is a great increase by simply sharing some insight in your message. While messages with numbers are great for reach, they’re likely hurting you CTR.
Why The Click Cutbacks?
Twitter has shown that sharing tweets that contain numbers increases retweets which in turn increases reach. Larger reach is nice but HubSpot has found that even though using statistics caused an increase in retweets by 5.4% on their own channel, those messages received 32.7% less clicks than average. Why is this? Social messages that contain stats provide wonderful upfront value. They give you a great piece of information right there in the message itself. This is also likely the reason they see less clicks.
If you give someone the information upfront, what reason do they have to click-through to read the whole article? The feeling is that you’ve already given them the important information right in the message, so why bother clicking and spend time reading more?
The other reason we see an increase in retweets and a drop in clicks is because of the nature of social. We want to share valuable information through our social channels. Often, we do that by retweeting messages that we believe may be interesting or valuable to others. A statistic provides that value and we often retweet them for this reason but we also have a tendency to not bother reading all of the data provided (such as the attached links). This type of retweeting often leads to lower CTRs. You may be able to help increase these click rates by using the retweet with comment feature to add commentary or indication that people should read the whole story, not just the stat.
Strike A Balance
So how can you include statistics for the boost in reach they bring but still see great click-through rates? It’s all about balance. Don’t include stats in every single message. Your social strategy should have messaging that includes a large range of messaging types to see which work best for you. Be sure you’re using headlines, stats, questions, and a variety of other message formats to keep your followers interested. Test which types bring you the best returns and utilize a mix of those best performers. By knowing how different messaging formats perform, we can utilize the proper one to give us peak performance in every promotion.
