
You should follow me on Twitter - tdavis
http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html
======
ironkeith
I've read in the past that telling people to do something isn't as effective
as telling them that everyone else is doing it. I wonder how a phrase like
"most people who like my blog follow me on twitter" would fare?

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siong1987
how about "Follow me on twitter here. I have x followers."?

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PStamatiou
Similarly, I wonder how some automated text like "11,399 people follow me on
Twitter, you should too" would work.

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notaddicted
I'd word it like: "Join the 4,615 people following me on twitter _here_."

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thorax
Maybe... "You should join my 4,615 followers on Twitter _here_."

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notaddicted
Why not just go all out ;).

"You should join my 4,615 followers on Twitter _here_. Everybody uses it. All
the interesting people follow me. You really need to follow me now. I can't
believe you're reading this when you could already be following me. DO IT DO
IT DO IT. Fine. Enjoy your miserable life without me and die alone. Don't you
want to be popular and interesting?"

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jganetsk
The experiment is still going on! This guy wants to see what the clickthrough
rate is given the elaborate description of the exeperiment above the link.

How Hofstadterian!

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joubert
His blog has appealing typography and layout.

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abossy
Why did you link the word "Twitter?" My impression upon seeing that is that
the link would take me to twitter.com, not perform a follow action.

I would wager that the third message would fare better than the fourth (of the
examples you gave) if you rephrased:

You should follow me on _Twitter_

to:

You should _follow me_ on Twitter

~~~
dcurtis
I tried exactly what you describe.

The conversion for "follow me" as the link during my one test was 9.22%
compared to the "twitter" link, which was 10.09%.

I'm not sure why it performed (very slightly) worse. It might have to do with
the link being in the middle of the sentence (you have to go back and click
the link) rather than at the end, where you finish the sentence and click the
link.

~~~
derefr
Or perhaps people thought they really were going to get the Twitter home page,
but then thought "eh, may as well since I'm already here..."

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wooby
In Nielsen's "Designing Web Usability" I remember him frowning on the use of
"here" and "click here" as links. Since around 2000, when I first read the
book, I heeded his advice.

    
    
      For more information: click here
      To sign up, go here
    

were cardinal no-nos, if I remember correctly.

But it looks like everybody else uses this technique, and the average web
surfer is more likely to click give the redundant area to click on.

Maybe people are just more comfortable with "click here" when the links lead
to an undefined word, like Twitter. Would it be true to say that most people
on the web don't know what Twitter is? Do most of Curtis's visitors know what
it is? If most of his visitors don't know, are they clicking on "here" because
it's a more comfortable link given Twitter is undefined? While each of his
test cases vary in wording, the first 3 are all alike in that twitter is the
only word hyperlinked.

My theory is that people are less likely to click on hyperlinks if the
hyperlinked text or word is something they don't know about. If you're talking
about a brand name, service, or anything not general knowledge than you're
better off with "click here."

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paraschopra
I cannot stop myself from doing a plug for my startup Wingify
(<http://www.wingify.com/>) here :)

We have an A/B, split and multivariate testing platform ready to use. With
features such as running tests specific to a visitor segment (say organic) and
having multiple goals (say CTR and time spent), the platform is quite
powerful. So, if any of the fellow HNers wants to setup a similar experiment,
I would be really glad to create an account right away.

By the way, it would also be interesting to see how would call to actions rank
if you segment traffic into these buckets: regular blog readers, new visitors,
visitors from twitter. My hunch is that traffic from twitter would have
behaved quite differently from regular blog readers.

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DanielBMarkham
Ok.

I posted an article with questions about Twitter earlier today.

So now I have ten or twenty followers.

I mean this in a nice way, but -- so what? What do you do when you get
followers? Sell them stuff?

Seems like twitter followers are like blog readers. It's great to have them,
but you have to act like they're not there and concentrate on content quality.
Or maybe I missed something.

~~~
bts
I don't the link's particular destination here matters too much. His main
point pertains to the increase of clickthrough rates of (any) link by changing
the language of and around its text.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I guess my point would be why, as a reader, would I want to follow anybody?
Sorry for changing the point of view to the seller, but I'm wondering what's
in it for the buyer? What's the transaction that's taking place here?

Given that piece of information, applying some of the practices of persuasion
mentioned in other posts starts to make sense, but without understanding the
transaction, I'm not sure what his point is. Just to get people to click a
button? Surely there's more to it than that. (Although I _do_ get the A/B kind
of discussion, just wanted to move the discussion towards a "what's in it for
me" vein if I could)

EDIT: Instead of all this A/B crap, how about just honestly tell the reader
why they want to do this? Is that such a crazy idea?

~~~
symptic
Dustin's research has applications in areas where every word makes a
difference in your marketing efforts, or in guiding users more effortlessly
through a process. That's why it's important.

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alexgartrell
I wonder if it wasn't, in some way, correlated with the length.

More characters means more like to be seen.

~~~
dcurtis
I tried other longer but dulled phrases:

"Please follow me on twitter here."

"I have an account on twitter."

"I'm @dcurtis on twitter."

"Follow me at <http://twitter.com/dcurtis>

They performed poorly.

~~~
delano
You ought to include those in the data set.

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Evgeny
You _should_ include those in the data set.

~~~
delano
Is it "should"? I don't like that word. Are there other options?

~~~
neilc
I think the parent comment was a joke -- "ought to" is perfectly fine usage in
that situation, I believe.

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axod
One thing this doesn't measure is quality. Only quantity.

Don't quite know how you can measure that though.

~~~
jbenz
I'd like to see how many of these visitors who clicked through each link
actually converted (as in, signed up as a follower).

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Confusion
I like his articles, but this one is silly. 4 Messages on 4 blogposts and he's
drawing conclusions? That little data doesn't warrant any conclusions: too
many uncontrolled variables. Results might as well be random. Audience, and
expected clickthrough rate, per post topic may differ, the effect of repeating
the implorement several times kicks in and if I bothered to give it some more
thought, I could probably come up with ten other reasons that could explain
the results. That was even possible after the first set of measurements in my
physics graduation experiment; let alone in sociology/psychology.

~~~
zackattack
i wasn't under the impression that it was 4 messages on 4 blogposts? i thought
it was a universal include? but then it would only additionally account for
archived posts..

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Confusion
I only count 14 articles on <http://dustincurtis.com/index.html>, of which the
first bunch doesn't contain any of these Twitter 'invites'. Neither does his
blog. Am I overlooking something?

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jodrellblank
He opens with "I spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve user
experiences", so where in this are you thinking about the user experience?

Why do I want to be influenced to follow you on Twitter?

~~~
dcurtis
If I can phrase things to drive people more efficiently through interfaces, it
will help them have a better experience.

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blader
This is fantastic.

Just curious - did you run any tests for statistical significance?

~~~
timr
Assuming a truly random sample of 5000 unique, non-overlapping viewers for
each experiment, the standard error for the experiments runs from .3% to .5%.

The true value for any given sample is pretty likely (> 95%) to be within +/-2
standard errors. So in this case, the difference needs to be more than
0.6%~1.0%, depending on the experiments you're comparing. In other words,
these look like they're significant differences.

(For reference SE ~ sqrt(p*(1-p)/N) when N is small relative to the population
size)

~~~
huhtenberg
Do you exclude traffic and clicks received from HN ?

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timr
Heh...well, I didn't do the experiment. I'm just the messenger.

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TravisLS
I suspect (with no evidence whatsoever) that the increase from linking "here"
was because people felt clicking the link would complete the action rather
than just take them to twitter.

I wonder what the effect would have been had you used: You should _follow me
on twitter_.

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jlongster
Anybody else feel like you should get a reason for following someone's
twitter? "You should follow me because I'll make you pancakes every morning."

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axl
Seems to be a bit of a statistic maniac. <http://dustincurtis.com/about.html>

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bearwithclaws
Dustin continues to impress me. Wondering had he try more 'counter-intuitive'
suggestions like:"You must not follow me at Twitter"?

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seldo
Generally I'm against using the word "here" as link-text, since it doesn't
provide any Google-juice to the relevant terms. But in this case the only
other possible link texts might be "follow me" or "Twitter", so it's probably
okay.

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yan
Are these numbers correlated with numbers of visitors to your blog? If your
visitors went up by 10% during a month and the amount of your followers went
up by 10%, it doesn't necessarily mean it was because of wording...

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markerdmann
It would be interesting to see a table showing each phrase you tested along
with its clickthrough rate.

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alexandros
I wonder if the wording has a qualitative effect on the people who tend to
click on the link though.

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guicifuentes
This is not about this article in particular, but there has been a lot of news
about Twitter these days here in HN but really, do they deserve this relevance
and attention?

~~~
Elepsis
I realize you said you weren't talking about this article in particular, but
really, the fact that this happens to mention Twitter is entirely peripheral
to the point.

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onreact-com
How about: "People who follow me on Twitter live longer, happier lives and
have three times as much sex as the average citizen! Follow me now!"

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edw519
Pardon me for the blasphemy, but if I wasn't already following your writing
and didn't know better, this whole post would strike me as a little "mail
order sleezy".

Instead of spending valuable resources tweaking the wording of your links, why
not just channel that same energy into providing excellent content, and let
the rest take its course.

That's why I follow you in the first place.

~~~
sgupta
Tweaking the wording of your links is time well spent. Imagine if the same
testing methodology was applied to the Sign Up button on a B2B app. You could
drastically increase conversions with just a few small modifications!

~~~
petercooper
Precisely. It's so sad some people focus only on getting traffic to their
sites and then don't focus on the conversions. If people focused on
conversions and experience more than traffic, the Web would be a lot more
pleasant.

