New data released by Dan Zarella today shows what image attachment services earn more retweets on Twitter.
It is easy to understand that Tweets with images drive engagement. However, the options for attaching images with 3rd party services (Facebook, Instagram) as well as Twitter's native application (Twitpic, pic.Twitter.com) have never been greater. Therefore, digital marketers want to know which image attachment application drives more engagement on Twitter.
The Experiment - Four apps and 480,000 data points
Based on a dataset of more than 480,000 randomly selected Tweets, Zarrella discovered that a wide chasm exists between various image attachment apps when measuring the number of retweets after the tweet with the image has gone live.
Zarrella tested four of the most popular image-posting apps used on Twitter:
- pic.Twitter.com: This is Twitter's native photo attachment app
- Instagram: Instagram has the ability to attach photos to a Tweet with a link
- Twitpic: A popular Twitter app that tracks click & engagement statistics
- Facebook: Simple photo attachments through a link
The Findings - Winners and losers
At a 99.9% confidence interval, Dan Zarrella found tweets that attached a photo using Twitter's native photo attachment app pic.twitter.com were 94% more likely to be retweeted. Twitpic attachments were 64% more likely to be retweeted when used to attach a photo to a Twitter update.
Facebook and Linkedin were clearly the losers of the group when attaching images to tweets. Both services actually lowered the likelihood of earning a retweet. These findings are very surprising since most studies have found that attaching additional multimedia (photos, videos or links) to a social media update increases engagement in general.
Possible Explanation: "Echo Chamber Blindness"
The data does not speculate on what exactly lowered the engagement with the Facebook and Linkedin posts. However, the most obvious explanation based on my experience in social media is that social network users have been conditioned to ignore posts that contain content hosted on other social networks. I'll call it "Echo Chamber Blindness".
This conditioning is similar to 'ad blindness' in search engine results. Over the years, search engine users have been conditioned to avoid the sponsored results due to less relevancy and quality. Similarly, social media users may have been conditioned to avoid posts that contain content from other social networks because so many people automate messaging from other social networks to Twitter. This 'Echo Chamber' effect from automating messaging from other social networks may be the cause behind the fact that images from Facebook and Instagram on Twitter actually lower engagement.
Here is the infographic that explains Dan Zarrella's findings: