Where In A Tweet Should You Put Your Link?

Most people assume that links belong at the end of a tweet. You write a headline or description of the link, and paste it into the tweet right at the end. However, research from Dan Zarrella of HubSpot suggests that this is not necessarily the case; in fact, you'll get more clicks if you don't put your link at the end of your tweet. To figure out where a link should appear in a tweet, Zarrella looked at 200,000 random tweets that contained links shortened with bit.ly. He calculated the click through rate (CTR) by counting the number of clicks a link received and dividing this by the number of followers that user had. Then, he graphed the position of the link in each tweet with its CTR in the heat map below: The deeper red the area, the higher the CTR of the tweets containing links in that section of the tweet. As you can see, links that appear at the end of the tweets examined don't have a CTR as high as those tweets about 25% of the way through the tweet. To simplify, according to this heat map, the best place to put a tweet is about a quarter way through the tweet. The worst place is right near the beginning, and the second best is right near the end. While I'm not sure about the length of the tweets examined and other factors like whether some were sent by celebrities, these results are surprising. The vast majority of tweets I see which contain a link place it at or near the end, and those are the links I personally click on. Do you find yourself clicking on links in the middle of tweets more often than those at the end? If so, why? Let us know in the comments. (Image courtesy of kovaleff via Shutterstock)

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Where In A Tweet Should You Put Your Link?

Lauren Dugan

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Lauren Dugan