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> a zillion people may see it as opposed to your mom and best friend who read it on your blog. The same zillion people will see your short summary and the link
by bachmeier 4y ago
> a zillion people may see it as opposed to your mom and best friend who read it on your blog.
The same zillion people will see your short summary and the link to your blog on Twitter.
- paxys 4y agoThey will see the link. They will not click on the link.
- rglullis 4y agoHow many people actually click on a link, instead of scrolling down?
- jabroni_salad 4y ago1% or less. Threads work because the content is already on the screen.
- kazinator 4y agoI suspect that a decently large proportion of the readers will click who would have scrolled down, if you sufficiently engage them with three or four tweets followed by a link promising they can read the whole thing as a nicely formatted article. Or heck, just tweet the whole article as a thread, but have a link to the blog version somewhere near the top. "Read in article format here ...".
- Alex3917 4y agoNo they won't. Twitter threads generate tens or hundreds of times more engagement than blog posts linked to from Twitter. Even getting 20 or 30k page views from making the front page of HN is nothing compared to the engagement that Twitter can generate.
- jasode 4y ago>The same zillion people will see your short summary and the link to your blog on Twitter. No, that isn't what happens and the author of this thread's article makes the same mistake when he writes: > do not use Twitter. Your ideas, your findings, your knowledge deserve better. Put your thoughts on your own website or blog, and share it with the World using whatever social network you see fit. Agree that Twitter is terrible reading experience for long form text but the advice given above (by many complainers) misses a crucial issue: tweets with just a link to a blog article has less engagement and that's a penalty writers don't want pay. https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkless-tweets-experiment/ https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkless-tweets-experiment/ Writers prioritize reaching maximum audience size.
- xg15 4y agoThat's true in the sense of "that's just how the world works", but it also seems like a really shitty state of affairs - a state that Twitter is actively pushing, for its own benefit and to the detriment of everybody else.
- tomjakubowski 4y agoProbably less than 1% of those people would click the link, and 10% of those would read it after clicking. Maybe do both: write the thread with some detail, and link to your blog with even more detail in the first couple tweets.
- shagie 4y agoTwitter threads, as awkward as they are, give the option for people to engage with each tweet. Engaging with a blog post involves leaving the site, reading it, returning to twitter, and then tweeting an out of context something.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- simonw 4y agoTwitter's analytics will reveal that a depressingly tiny portion of them will actually click on the link.
- bachmeier 4y agoTrue. Also true: Very few of the Twitter engagements mean anything at all. Clicking a Twitter link is extremely low cost. If you're not even willing to do that, you don't care about the topic or the person that tweeted it.
- abnercoimbre 4y agoUnfortunately these Twitter metrics are then packaged up to show on the next investor pitch. It's a vicious cycle.
- asenna 4y agoI think I read somewhere recently that Twitter is actively throttling distribution for anything containing links externally. They want you to remain on their platform.
- baxtr 4y agoThis is exact opposite of good product management. Don't introduce barriers for consumption. Instead realize that people are lazy. Some might click on a link to get them to a page inside their twitter app on their mobile. Most won't. Missed opportunity to get into the head of your audience. btw: Did you just read this comment? Would you have read it if I had linked out?