If you are trying to drive more traffic to your website, it is a good idea to share links to articles or other pages on your website through social media channels. And when you do so, you will want to increase your click-through rate ("CTR"), i.e. the rate at which others click-through your links to arrive at your website. You may think that sharing a link with hundreds or thousands of followers, on Twitter for instance, will naturally result in many clicks through to your website. It is, however, not quite as easy as that and there are some additional tips to consider when sharing links.

Social Media Scientist at HubSpot, Dan Zarella recently blogged about 10 words that can increase or decrease your CTR. They are as follows:-

These can increase your CTR

1. #

2. "daily is out"

3. via

4. @

5. RT

6. please

7. check

These can decrease your CTR

8. @addthis

9. marketing

10. @getglue

Comment

Dan provides more detailed explanations and statistics for each of these.

In our experience, Dan is right to point out these words/characters as being tools to increase or decrease your CTR. The hashtag # e.g. #law or #ukemplaw, the fact that someone is mentioned through the @ character, the words 'RT', 'please' and 'check' all serve similar purposes in social media - they are all tools to direct people to read a certain link, establish its source, what it is about and who would want to read it. It is, therefore, not too surprising that such words/characters can increase click-through rates, but it is useful as a refresher in good social media practice and it certainly interesting to see the propositions backed up by statistics by Dan Zarella.

It does come as a bit of a surprise that Paper.li clickthroughs increase because of the "daily is out" wording, although it has to be wondered if such click-throughs are also caused by the fact that paper.li expressly mentions people in the same tweet, thereby raising the chance of someone clicking the link.

In terms of the words that can decrease CTR, again these are not too surprising. I can't remember the last time I sent a tweet with '@addthis' contained within it. Theoretically a link may have come via @addthis, but the actual primary source of the link is the author or the original publication, which should be the source referenced.

When used well, the above words can help to increase your CTR on Twitter. Ultimately, however, for a long-term strategy to increase your click-through rate, focussing on your relationships with others on Twitter and other social media platforms and growing your social networks can yield some of the best results.

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