Test: I asked @duckduckgo followers to RT this tweet.
As you can see from the tweet, I linked to a special URL, dukgo.com, that hardly anyone uses, and so I used it to track clicks. All told, 73 clicks. So that's ~2 clicks per RT--not too good.
Follow me on Twitter.
Or by RSS.
Or email.
I also RTd it from @yegg (my personal account) with slightly different text.
Hypothesis: I wasn't sure what to expect, but figured I would get a bunch of RTs because my followers seem pretty solid (not spam, auto follows or other non-sense). After that, I thought maybe I'd get some 2nd level RTs. I wasn't even holding out hope it would go viral, and of course it didn't.
Results: I tallied up the RTs using twitter search. The @duckducko tweet was RTd by 18 people using Twitter's RT system. The @yegg tweet was RTd by 6 people. Then there were 11 people who RTd it on their own, 4 of which got RTd 1 time each. This totals 39 RTs.
All of these people for the most part aren't spammy either, i.e. their accounts look real, with real followers. Counting them up they had 4,406 followers (avg 126, min 6, max 408). I threw out one outlier who had 22,150 followers but was also following 24,308.
As you can see from the tweet, I linked to a special URL, dukgo.com, that hardly anyone uses, and so I used it to track clicks. All told, 73 clicks. So that's ~2 clicks per RT--not too good.
I also considered RTs/followers. @duckduckgo has 848 followers, so that's 3.4% who RTd it. At the second level you have the 4,406 followers tied to those RTs plus my 911 followers for 5,317 followers. At 10 RTs, that's 1.8%. So you can see the drop off.
Here are my takeaways:
- You need a lot of followers. I'd say you'd need two orders of magnitude more, i.e. 100K real followers, to make this at all worthwhile. Then we're talking on the order of 10K clicks.
- To go viral, you'd need RTs by important people. I'm really grateful for all the RT support, but no one had a ton of meaningful followers. I think you'd need that celebrity push to get it out there, which may kick off other celebrity RTs.
- To go viral, you'd probably need more compelling content. Of course this test was business related, but you'd probably need it tied to either more of a fad/news story or have more of a hook, e.g. a super interesting Web page on the other side.
- Viral coefficient is not 0. There were second level RTs. If the content also lent itself to RTing, i.e. it was a game or something that involved tweeting, you might be able to bring that up and keep the chain going.
I also tried Fiverr, a service where people say what they'll do for $5. I spent $15 on 3 people who seemed legit and said they would retweet to all of their x thousand followers. Only one has done it so far, and that yielded a RT by 1 person (none of which I counted above). So I'm guessing that is not going to be a good advertising channel.