Social Media Reruns Are Ratings GoldThe impact of reposting URLs on audience engagement on Twitter

August 2014

www.rallyverse.com@rallyverse

In planning your social and content marketing strategy, we’re big believers in using your Evergreen Content as often as possible.

That is, you should make sure your content strategy has room for your brand content that isn’t tied to a particular time or event:

Product descriptions, explanatory videos, images, blog posts, how-to guides, etc.

But how much evergreen content is too much evergreen content?

That is,

if you continue to post the same links to the same pieces of content, will your audience get bored and stop clicking?

We pulled the data.

Specifically, we looked at a single marketer with more than 1,000 followers on Twitter who posted 28 unique URLs between 1 and 7 times in June and July, 2014.

That is, 8 URLs were posted once, two were posted twice, six were posted three times, and so forth.

Looking at the data a slightly different way, you can see how many posts there were by order of post:

As you can see, only three URLs made it all the way to elusive seventh spot, while five made it to the sixth (three of which went on to become seventh posts).

With that data set, how did the average clicks per post change for each spot in the order of posting?

That is, was there a downside to posting URLs more than once?

And, as you posted more frequently, did your average clicks decline?

Nope.

Not at all.

In terms of average clicks, we don’t see a decline with each successive post. Not at all.

Here’s another look:

While the data is noisy throughout, the overall trend line is actually positive.

That is,

Posting URLs more than once didn’t lead to fewer clicks per post — it led to more clicks per post.

Maybe a few posts were outliers and were dragging the curve up and down?

If you tease out each individual URLs clicks versus average by position, you see variance even on the individual URLs:

So what gives?

Why are the results so inconsistent?

Does post order matter at all?

The short answer is, probably not, specifically because it’s very unlikely that you’re holding everything else equal when you share your owned content more than once.

That is, the URLs in the data set may have been posted more than once, but they weren’t posted the same way.

There are plenty of variables that can impact the performance of those posts:

Tweet copy/ accompanying text, including use of hashtags

Use of images

Time of day, day of week of publishing

Relevance of the topic at time of publishing

Given the number of other factors that impact the click performance of a single Tweet, there doesn’t appear to be any downside to sharing a link to the same URL more than once.

If the exact same Tweet was shared again and again, well, yes, we imagine the audience might get a bit bored.

But, by varying the presentation of those URLs, and making sure that the copy is relevant to the topics that matter to the audience, marketers can earn clicks again and again — and deliver value to their audience.

Rallyverse Confidential — Do Not Distribute

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So, go ahead, share it again. And again. And one more time.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a tool to help you manage all of that owned content and posting for you?

Don’t worry:

Rallyverse can help .

Thank You

info@rallyverse.com@rallyverse