Pin The Tweet To The Profile

Morning folks 👋

What’s interesting about pursuing a story is discovering something far more interesting in the process. But before I dive into that, here is the intro I neglected to send in last week’s email.

My name is Holden Page, and I am an editor at Crunchbase News. While not editing, I am staring down the depths of Google Analytics, project managing, and thinking about where to get that next dedicated reader. Hot Pulp is a place for me to document that experience and connect with those who also think about such topics.

Last week, I said I would talk about the data behind Casey Newton’s newsletter. Out of that research, I found what I think is a useful nugget of knowledge:

This Twitter feature allows you to save exactly one tweet to the top of your profile page—a heavily trafficked portion of your Twitter presence.

For instance, I can tell you somewhat confidently that active Twitter accounts with around 50,000 followers or more likely get 5,000 or more profile visits a month. And I believe those visits can convert into newsletter subscribers, app downloads, or whatever other thing you want to point visitors to.

To help back this, let’s take a look at where Casey Newton’s 4750+ subscribers (probably) come from.

In Newton’s Twitter profile is a Bitly link (http://bit.ly/2yTbZcK) to his newsletter subscriber page. By appending a + symbol to the end of that link (http://bit.ly/2yTbZcK+), I know that 2,700+ clicks to Newton’s subscriber page were from Twitter.

And here’s where I make a leap: I am betting that 50 percent of those Twitter clicks turned into over 1,300 subscribers to Newton’s newsletter in the past year. (It’s worth noting I am fairly confident that this link primarily lives in Newton’s Twitter profile.)

That means I am attaching nearly 30 percent of his total subscribers to one obscure Twitter link visible only on his Twitter profile. That’s bold, I know. So let’s get more realistic and say only five percent of those clicks turn into subscribers. That’s still 138 subscribers, making that one little link responsible for 3 percent of total subscribers to Newton’s newsletter.

In either case, those numbers strike me as really impressive. So what if you could give that link more prominence? That’s where a pinned tweet comes in.

My theory is that a pinned tweet, with smart copy and a clear call to action, can turn profile visits into another potential conversion funnel for anything you want. For reference, here is a very rough example of a pinned tweet that could encourage Twitter profile visitors to turn into subscribers for Crunchbase News.

Now I am not expecting that such a pinned tweet would vastly improve sign-ups. But I’ll take subscribers where I can get them. Furthermore, it’s interesting to think about how a pinned tweet could serve as a test bed for new ad styles before committing ad budget.

All that said, I am not sure if it will work at all. It’s very possible that the data I have access to is wrong in some way. (Does Twitter count bot traffic in profile visits? Is Bitly’s traffic attribution accurate? No idea to both.) But there’s no harm in trying, and pending EIC approval, I hope to share results in a few weeks.

Interesting tidbit: Click on your individual tweet analytics and see how many profile visits you get from each tweet you send. I think you’ll be surprised. My last 8 tweets lead to 21 profile clicks.

This is a bit of a reach for news behind news. But Crunchbase News is an all remote team, and reading about a company with 700 remote employees is really encouraging.

I am really into homepages lately. I’ve been taking some general notes on how publishers design their homepages for about six months. However, I want to get more concrete and find out just how many links major publishers show readers above the fold on desktops.

Have a thought, correction, or something you want me to explore next? Contact me here: