Q: Do resort tweets with pictures get more link clicks than those without?

When inline photos were first added to the Twitter feed back in October 2013, impatient marketers quickly compiled tiny data sets declaring that tweets with photos get more clicks. But over a year later, does that trend still hold true when evaluated with a larger, more mature sample? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 4,000 resort tweets that contained a Bitly link (click stats are public). This set of 4,000 tweets DID NOT include URLs that were tweeted by the resort more than once, also shared on the resort’s Facebook page, or links originally shared by someone else that the resort had retweeted. We found the average click rate of each group and plotted it below.

From our sample of 4,000 tweets, tweets with images averaged a 1.24% click rate while tweets without images averaged a 1.46% click rate. In other words, tweets with images received 15% fewer clicks on average than plain text tweets.

What This Means
The rationale behind the anecdotal observations of increased clicks back in 2013 was simply that inline images were drawing more attention to these tweets and, thus, increasing clicks.

This resort-specific data set, however, tells the exact opposite story. That perhaps images are distracting followers from the contents of your tweet instead of drawing more attention to it. Decreasing clicks instead of driving more. Either way, a very interesting and surprising result.

More & Merrier
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