It always interests me to understand how much I invest in building a particular medium, and how much I can get out of it. I have been working on a few Twitter profiles for years. My largest has about 9000 followers, and we get about 1.5 clicks per tweet assuming those tweets are not during the middle of the night. Sure, there are optimal times in the day for tweeting, but I can only do it when I can.
Twitter click/tweet ratio
What I learned is that it takes me about 15 minutes, three times a week to manage a Twitter profile and grow it by about 300 members per week. Sometimes I am busy and can only do it once, but if I do what I am supposed to, I get a new follower rate of about 400 per hour spent, and then put time into following people back, doing a little tweeting, and interacting. 400/hour is not a bad ratio. I can’t do much more than 15 minutes per session or my relevancy rate of targeting new followers becomes not worth it. Since my largest account gets 1.5 clicks per tweet, and has 9000 followers, you could say that it might take me 22 hours of labor spent slowly for several months to get 1.5 clicks per tweet. If I spent 100 hours of time, my tweet rate might go up to 7 or more depending on the relevancy rate. Another factor to consider is that my older followers might not be so active. New followers on Twitter tend to click and retweet a lot more than old ones.
With my other Twitter account I get .75 clicks per tweet with 2000 followers, so the ratio is very different because the followers were more recently acquired. Interesting data!
Google+ click/post ratio
On a brighter note, my Google+ account is getting me more like 4 clicks per post average with only 600 followers. This is a rough estimate. I’ll fine tune it once I get to about 1000 followers. It is hard to take a measurement because I don’t know how popular a particular post will be until afterwards. In any case, It is exciting to get all of these clicks.
Google plus makes it slower and harder to acquire followers. I have become good at it, but the actual physical process of implanting them in one of your circles is cumbersome as the load time is currently slow with Googleplus. On the other hand, unfollowing is easy if you remove the whole circle that particular followees are in. Five seconds, and I can delete hundreds of followees with whom that I have given a week to follow me back.
Comparison
It seems that with Twitter, I get about 1 click per 3000 newer followers per tweet, and a somewhat lesser ratio with older followers of perhaps 1 click per 6000. It might take 8 hour of labor to get 3000 followers to get that 1click/tweet ratio. With Googleplus, it takes more like one hour of labor to get perhaps only 60 followers. I can follow about 500, but only 12-15% actually follow me back. However, those 60 followers are much more valuable to me than 60 twitter followers. So, it might take 2.5 hours of labor to get 150 followers on Googleplus. Those 150 followers would get me the same click rate that 3000 recent (12 months or less) followers on Twitter would get me. However, for the sake of numbers, let me do a 100 hour guesstimate for both mediums.
100 hours of twitter: 40,000 followers: 12 clicks / tweet
100 hours on G+: 6000 followers: 40 clicks / post
This is purely an estimate though. Additionally, I will say that on on of my Google+ accounts, the length of visits is much higher than on other mediums. I got average visits of four minutes this month which is fantastic. My other Google+ account (for notary work) got slightly above average for minutes per visit which is also encouraging.
Based on inconclusive evidence, it seems that Google+ might be a much more efficient medium for getting clicks than Twitter, although Facebook is still the king of social media as far as vast volumes of clicks is concerned. Also, don’t overlook Twitter for SEO value as it can be the most effective tool if you get in depth interactions with others or high quantities of retweets!