Some social media managers love the convenience of a Tweet button. Others hate how the buttons clutter up otherwise elegant web design. Love them or hate them, but Tweet buttons account for roughly 1 in 5 tweets from news organization websites, finds an analysis by Joshua Benton at Neiman Lab. Using a Ruby script that shows how many of recent tweets containing a specific URL were generated using a Tweet Button, Benton examined the 1,000 most recent tweets for 37 news sites.
According to his findings:
… killing off Tweet Buttons would, for most news organizations, remove somewhere around 20 percent of their Twitter link mentions. Maybe more, if … those Tweet Button users are often something like a Tweeter Zero — an originator that enables a story’s later spread through other means.
Of course, the numbers vary depending on the niche, presumably because readers of tech websites are savvy enough to tweet without the help of a button. Read his full analysis on the Nieman Lab blog.
