The Shocking Truth About Tweets and LinkedIn Publications.

LinkedIn Publication Twitter Share Analytics.

Social media for business comes with detailed analytics. This means we can measure everything we do. Sometimes these numbers throw up some disturbing information.

The problem at hand is one I've long known about and mentioned before. Now don't get me wrong here, I am extremely grateful for the recognition and the exposure of any and all twitter shares of my LinkedIn Publications, but I think the numbers are worth reporting.

Here is an example, just one example amongst many, of a twitter share of a LinkedIn Publication. My Publication, "How to Use LinkedIn for B2B...", was shared as a tweet by a Twitter "star". Said star has 103,000 twitter followers. His original twitter share has been retweeted 11 times. It has been favorited 18 times. The retweeters themselves have, I estimate, between them another 30K followers.

So how many click thrus or additional views of the LinkedIn publication would you expect from all this activity on twitter? Let's suppose just 1% of all these followers click thru. Thats 1330 additional views of the post, right (ignoring overlap of followers for simplicity)?

Well, before the tweet got sent out there were around 60 views on the article. This morning it stood at 129. Let's suppose all these new views are entirely down to the tweet and it's retweets. That is just 70 views driven by the 12 tweets to 133,000 followers. But, in fact, that wasn't the only tweet of the post. There have been several other twitter shares of it too. So only some of the twitter driven traffic was generated by our star.

Moreover, in reality, a large fraction of those 70 new views have come from LinkedIn shares, likes and comments on the post.

There are only two possible answers to this enigma.
1. LinkedIn Publications are not registering views generated by Twitter.
2. Twitter is extremely ineffective for driving click thrus to LinkedIn articles.
Either one of these is disturbing.

As I said, I've had my LinkedIn Publications shared on twitter many, many times by lots of people with good followings and I have measured the impact each time. A handful of extra views is the norm. Don't get me wrong, the reputational impact of being recognized by these shares is still very important, but measuring the impact and outcomes of events is important for effective strategies.

We ignore the analytics of social media at our peril.