How to get more mouse clicks from Twitter

(Feature image by JoseAlvesSilva)

This article was written mostly to help authors get more clicks (therefore sell more books) using their twitter accounts, but I think any business owner or product promoter can learn from this.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably already using Twitter to market your book or product, but sometimes Twitter can be frustrating because even when you’re posting and promoting constantly, you’re getting very few clicks or sales from your efforts.

I started using an app & service called Buffer about 6+ months ago. There’s a free version or you can upgrade for unlimited access. Buffer allows you to space out and schedule your social media posts ahead of time (it can sync to most of the social media services out there). The benefit is that you don’t overload your followers with a ton of posts on a single day, followed by days of meager updates. It spaces things out and it keeps you constant.

Another benefit of Buffer, is that it gives you feedback on how many people clicked on your posted links, and it keeps record of likes/stars/retweets/replies and so on…

From studying the pattern of responses, I noticed one important lesson:

I received the most clicks to my links when I included some kind of narrative!

Here are some screen captures from my phone of the Buffer analytics section from various tweets I posted:

The bull’s eye icon is the actual mouse clicks that a link received.

Read some of the tweets and take a look at how many clicks each tweet received. What do you notice?

There’s a variety of tweets, but the highest click-through rate happens when I actually pull excerpts from my book (Amidst Traffic). These excerpts serve as little narrative teases. Each one evokes a sense of emotion or wonder by telling a story, even if only in part. In just a few characters, these tweets place the reader in a narrative. A lot of details are missing, of course, but that creates even more mystery and allure. The reader finds himself wanting to know more and therefore clicks on the link.

Compare that to some of my other posts, and barely anyone cares! Even when I promoted SOMEBODY ELSE’S book, which happened to be FREE that day, only one person clicked on that link!

Something else to notice:

At the time that theses tweets were posted, I had approximately 4,500+/- followers on Twitter. My “narrative” tweets received as many as 47 clicks and as few as 17, but most of the time they averaged between 40 and 50 clicks each. That’s about 1% of my total followers.

Compare that to my other links, which mostly received between 1 and 5 clicks, and that’s 0.1% (that’s with a POINT before the one, so a TENTH of a percent).

Considering that less than one percent (in my experience) of clicks actually result in book sales, I need at least 100 clicks before I can expect to sell a copy of my book. It becomes a numbers game, but the numbers can be driven (and enhanced) by quality narrative.

Consider that for your marketing efforts moving forward.

What about you?

What efforts have you seen that drive more clicks and book sales for you?