Want to expand your reach and influence on Twitter? Share links.

Why links?

Research shows that:

1. Links increase followers.

The more links you share, the more followers you’ll get, according to research by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella.

For his study, Zarrella analyzed a random selection of more than 130,000 Twitter users. He found that the more links tweeters share the more followers they get.

Twitter accounts with more than 1,000 followers tend to tweet many more links than those with fewer than 1,000 followers.

Starbucks is a master of this approach. The coffee merchant’s tweeters tweet links to recipes, photos and all things coffee. Sample tweets:

“Mmmm, coffee cupcakes!”

“What’s the secret ingredient in our Chocolate Cinnamon Bread? A pinch of #nomnom”

“Cheers! Coffee Ice Cream Martinis #starbucksicecream”

“Tiramisu Ice Cream Parfaits anyone?”

Sharing valuable resources via links helped land Starbucks on Time magazine’s list of best corporate Twitter feeds.

People want to know what you know. Link to your research and resources.

2. Links go viral.

The more links you share, the more retweets you’ll get, according to Zarrella’s research. For this study, Zarrella looked at nearly 10 million random tweets and 10 million retweets.

He found that nearly 60% of retweets include links; fewer than 20% of non-retweeted tweets do.

In another study, this one by SalesForce, tweets with links generated 86% more retweets than those without.

See how it’s done on JetBlue’s Twitter feed. The discount airline’s tweeters tweet links to travel tips and cheap seats. Sample tweets:

“Thunderstorms in the Northeast are causing delays and possible cancellations. Fee waivers in effect, check details at http://bit.ly/jbalert”

“To celebrate our newest destination Grand Cayman, we’re offering fares from JFK at $139 & Boston at $159 terms apply. http://cot.ag/OfgTBa”

“Getaways Cheeps! $299 pp/dbl occ limited avail 2nt pkgs to Nassau, Bahamas w/air from JFK or HPN. Terms apply. http://cot.ag/J8yBkB”

JetBlue also made Time magazine’s list of top corporate tweeters.

Want people to spread the word? Provide links to resources, tips and tools.

Best practices for linking

OK, so you’re in for more links. To make the most of your links, use these linking best practices:

1. Link 60% to 80% of the time.

Share links in 60 to 80% of your tweets, Zarrella counsels.

One great model of this approach is Southwest Airline’s Twitter feed. The discount airline’s tweeters tweet links to travel tips and cheap seats. Sample tweets:

“Hey DENVER! @byallmeansband will provide the summer sounds @downtowndenver tonight w/ a free concert!  Details here: http://cot.ag/OM6drM”

“Does your travel to-do list include attending a concert at the famed @RedRocksCO? We’re here to help.”

“We’ve lowered fares for fall travel with prices starting at $69 one-way to select destinations! (restrictions apply) http://cot.ag/MXOcd1”

Southwest also made Time magazine’s list of best corporate tweeters.

2. Where to place links.

Turns out there’s a place for everything on Twitter, too.

Followers are more likely to click on links placed 25% into your tweet than at the beginning or end, according to Zarrella’s research.

For his study, he used bit.ly API to analyze 200,000 random Tweets containing bit.ly links. Then he correlated the relationship of the link’s position in the tweet with its click-through rate. Those located 25% of the way in got the most click-throughs.

Want to increase click-throughs? It may be a matter of nudging your link a little to the left.

Link up.

Want your social media status updates to move further and faster? Share more links.

The post How to engage audiences on social media: Share links appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Your most important links are calls to action, writes HubSpot’s Kyle James. So how can you increase the chances that they’ll get clicked? Follow these five tips:

1. Avoid Fat Fingers/No Bars Syndrome.

Make “touch targets” at least 1cm × 1cm (0.4in × 0.4in) for mobile users.

2. Bold-face your most important links.

Visitors are 20% more likely to click on a bold-faced link, according to HubSpot research.

3. Go graphic.

Clickable images with text under them increased click-through rates by 100% in one Hubspot test.

4. Keep your call to action above the fold.

Visitors don’t always scroll.

5. Underline links and make them a different color.

Web users have learned to see underlined, colored text as links. Don’t make them learn a new approach for using your website.

“Users shouldn’t have to guess or scrub the page to find out where they can click,” writes usability expert Jakob Nielsen.

And if it’s not a link, don’t underline it. If you do, someone will click it. And that will confuse and irritate your visitors.

6. Make visited links a different color.

Reserve blue for unvisited links and use a clearly different, less saturated color for visited links, Nielsen suggests.

Some sites use gray for visited links, but Nielsen recommends that you avoid this practice. That’s because gray type is hard to read, and it’s often used online to show that something is unavailable.

7. Label links that do anything other than open a different webpage.

Let readers know if they’re opening a video or PDF by adding or [PDF] after the link.

Read Nielsen’s Guidelines for Visualizing Links and Link List Color on Intranets.
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Sources: Kyle James, “9 Ways to Optimize Your Links and Draw Attention to Your Calls to Action,” HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog, March 4, 2009

Jakob Nielsen, “Guidelines for Visualizing Links,” Nielsen Norman Group, May 10, 2004

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Think of links as the Goldilocks of microcontent: Some links are too long. Some links are too short. You want to write links that are just right.

Too long

Links are highly scannable. Blue underlined words stand out on a screen of black text on a white background.

But if everything stands out, nothing stands out. If your links are too long, your readers’ eyes may find nothing to land on.

The links in a PR e-zine, for instance, average 35 words. The longest tops out at 54. This one’s 32 words long:

That’s too long.

The solution: Link and bold-face the head; unlink and use plain text for the blurb. Like so:

That approach allows readers to scan headlines, then learn more from the blurb if they find something they like.

Too short

But if your links are too short, readers will have to read the copy around the link to understand what the link means.

Readers find this irritating. Plus, it slows them down, writes Jan H. Spyridakis, professor at the University of Washington College of Engineering.

MindHacks’ one-word links, for instance, are discombobulating. Who would click on article, acetylcholine, GABA, fentanyl, siege or BZ without knowing more?

They’re too short.

The solution: Rewrite sentences to create clusters of linkable words that give the context for the story. Instead of article, for instance, how about:

Or even:

Those five extra words add context, make the link clearer and the story more scannable — and may well increase clicks.

Just right

So how long should a link be?

‘Make links as short as you can and as long as you must.’ — Ann Wylie, writing coach
Click To Tweet

Make them 7 to 11 words long (PDF), suggests Jared M. Spool, CEO and founding principal of User Interface Engineering.

His research shows that visitors find what they’re looking for more efficiently on sites with:

• Longer links or
• Links followed by descriptive sentences

Visitors were less successful on sites with super-short links.

So “link length is less important than a good link description,” writes Marieke McCloskey, a user experience specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. “Use as many words as you need to accurately describe the page … while still being concise.”

In other words, as with most writing, make the link as long as you must and as short as you can.

But do keep it under 54 words.
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Sources: Marieke McCloskey, “Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword,” Nielsen Norman Group, March 9, 2014

Jan H. Spyridakis, “Guidelines for Authoring Comprehensible Web pages and Evaluating Their Success” (PDF), Technical Communications, August 2000

Jared Spool, Tara Scanlon, Will Schroeder, Carolyn Snyder and Terri DeAngelo: Website usability: A designer’s guide (PDF). User Interface Engineering (North Andover, Mass.), 1997

The post How to write a link that’s the right length appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Users look for links on pages like puppies look for your best shoes.

Or so say Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, the authors of How People Read on the Web.

They should know. The authors studied more than 300 people using hundreds of different websites for a total of 1.5 million fixations — or “looks” — and recordings that comprise more than 300 GB of data.

Links have superpowers …

Here are some other reasons that links matter:

1. Readers look at links.

Web visitors typically focus on link text when they scan a page, writes Marieke McCloskey, a user experience specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.

Want to put your key messages where readers’ eyes are?

Embed them in your clickable elements — links, story lists and teaser text, according to Eyetrack07, a Poynter Institute eye-tracking study. Those elements account for nearly half the “eye stops” — we non-scientists call this “looking” — on the web.

This finding gives us one more reason to write better links. Links draw web visitors’ eyes — and skimmers don’t read the surrounding text — so it’s essential to make yours more substantive than Click here or Read more.

Focus your attention on links, story lists and teaser copy. That’s where you’re most likely to reach readers online.

2. Links are scannable.

Users often skim for links and headings before they read other elements, according to Pernice et al. And they use links not just to get somewhere, but also to get a sense of what the page is about.

3. Links help SEO.

Search engines use linked anchor text as one clue to what the page or document is about. So good link writing can help boost your search-engine ranking.

4. Links increase social media reach and influence.

Links increase followers and are more likely to be retweeted, according to research by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella.

Get tips for linking on social media.

5. Links are a service to visitors.

Worried that external links might lead your visitor to another site?

“In online media, relevant links are always a service,” writes Amy Gahran, media consultant and content strategist. “In fact, if you mention something in a story for which you could include a relevant direct link and fail to do so, you’re probably only going to frustrate and eventually alienate your online audience.”

6. Links increase credibility.

Links to other sites increase credibility by more than 30%, writes Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group.

Providing links to other sites “is a sign of confidence, and third-party sites are much more credible than anything you can say yourself,” he writes. “Isolated sites feel like they have something to hide.”

7. Links get reciprocated.

Finally, Gahran says, you get what you give on the web.

Inbound links are essential to both website traffic and SEO. Visitors arriving by way of a link from a third party are more likely to pay closer attention to your site.

“If you don’t give many relevant links,” Gahran writes, “it’s unlikely you’ll get many in return.”

… But links are distracting.

Laura Miller has joined the growing movement toward delinkification. Instead of embedding links in the body of her columns, the senior editor at Salon is listing them at the bottom.

Why this movement against embedded links like this one? Among them:

1. Links are distracting.

Always have been. That split second we spend asking ourselves, “click?” draws our attention away from the copy and makes it harder for us to follow the writer’s train of thought.

And that doesn’t count the cognitive juice we spend when we actually do click — even if we don’t take topical sidebars. Somehow, in the course of researching this piece, for instance, I learned about Amazon’s new PayPhrase and visited the blog of a “mild-mannered, 28-year-old, former econ nerd.”

Links “foster a kind of attention deficit disorder, creating casual, easily distracted surfers instead of committed, engaged readers,” writes Jan H. Spyridakis, professor at the University of Washington College of Engineering.

We now know that that distraction follows us from the browser into the boardroom, thanks to Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Pointing and clicking our way through the hyperworld, it seems, makes it harder for us to concentrate in the real one.

Now, where was I?

Oh, yes. What are other problems with links?

2. It’s harder to get clicked on mobile.

Half of your audience members now visit your web pages, look at your email messages and browse your social media channels via their mobile devices, not their laptops. Problem is, mobile readers click 40% less often, according to Mailchimp.

Blame Fat Fingers/No Bars Syndrome. After spending a few hundred seconds waiting for a page to load on our smartphones before our streetcar stop, we’ve learned better than to try to click the right tiny button on our phones.

As a result, a mere 3.8%, on average, of people who view emails on their laptops or desktops click on at least one link. But only 2.7% of people who look at emails on their mobile devices click on at least one link.

Mobile readers also click on fewer links — 42% fewer than desktop or laptop users and 30% fewer than tablet users:

• Desktop or laptop users click on an average of 6.7% of links
• Tablet users: 5.6%
• Smartphone users: 3.9%

3. Links can discombobulate people.

Why?

• Readers will likely read the link first. As a result, they’ll read the sentence out of order, writes Spyridakis. That makes it harder to understand.
• The more links on a page, the harder it is for users to answer test questions in a study, writes Jared M. Spool, CEO and founding principal of User Interface Engineering.
• The more embedded links on a page, the harder it is for visitors to find what they were looking for, Spool’s research found.

4. Links can lead web visitors astray

External links can also take visitors to another site. (Not that visitors don’t know how to do that without a link.) And that makes some folks shy away from including external links.

Plus: Following embedded links “can be the web’s equivalent of traveling without an itinerary,” write P. Lynch and S. Horton in the Yale C/AIM Web style guide.

Link writing resources

Ready to write better links? Learn how to:

• Polish your link writing
• Write links that aren’t too long or short
• Avoid overlinking
• Format links

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Sources:

“Impact of Mobile Use on Email Engagement,” MailChimp, Aug. 8, 2017

Michael Bernard, Sprint Hull and Denise Drake, “Where should you put the links? A comparison of four locations,” Usability News, Jan. 10, 2002

Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Magazine, July/August 2008

Jason Fry, “Maximizing the values of the link: Credibility, readability, connectivity,” Nieman Journalism Lab, June 7, 2010

Amy Gahran, “External Links from Stories Are a Service, Not a Threat,” Poynter, updated March 3, 2011

Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, “Imprudent Linking Weaves a Tangled Web,” Computer, July 1997

Lynch and S. Horton, “Yale C/AIM Web style guide,” 1997

Marieke McCloskey, “Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword,” Nielsen Norman Group, March 9, 2014

Laura Miller, “The hyperlink war,” Salon.com, June 9, 2010

Laura Miller, “Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain,” Salon.com, May 9, 2010

Jakob Nielsen, “Trust or Bust: Communicating Trustworthiness in Web Design,” Nielsen Norman Group, March 7, 1999

Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen; How People Read on the Web: The Eyetracking Evidence; Nielsen Norman Group; Sept. 10, 2013

Matt Ritchel, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price,” The New York Times, June 6, 2010

Jared Spool, Tara Scanlon, Will Schroeder, Carolyn Snyder and Terri DeAngelo: Web site usability: A designer’s guide (PDF). User Interface Engineering (North Andover, Mass.), 1997

Pegie Stark Adam, Sara Quinn and Rick Edmonds, Eyetracking The News, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 2007

Jan H. Spyridakis, “Guidelines for Authoring Comprehensible Web Pages and Evaluating Their Success” (PDF), Technical Communications, August 2000

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