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I don't say this whatsoever to show off but just as an observer of the system: when I tweet about a new blog post I write which includes the link to the post (not in a followup tweet), the single tweet often gets a few hundred likes and tens of retweets.

While to a degree I believe people (even Twitter themselves) when they say tweet with links are downgraded, it clearly isn't crippling.

2 comments

Sure, when you have 18k followers, you’re in the point-{oh,…}-one percent.

Meanwhile with 7k followers I barely get ten.

But I’ll try it more and see. Thanks for pointing that out.

EDIT: it’s possible you might be preempting the downweight because you’re including a screenshot with all of your links. I.e. the downweight only happens if twitter shows the expando for an external link, which doesn’t happen when screenshots are included. Either way, I’ll be implementing your technique. :)

> EDIT: it’s possible you might be preempting the downweight because you’re including a screenshot with all of your links. I.e. the downweight only happens if twitter shows the expando for an external link, which doesn’t happen when screenshots are included. Either way, I’ll be implementing your technique. :)

Interesting. The reason I've always done this is just because I want to give people a meaningful preview of the first few paragraphs. And I figured that it's been effective. In more than one ways, perhaps, now I see.

It’s possible that the screenshot is just so good at grabbing attention that it cancels out the downweight, too. It’s hard to know anything when the algorithm is a black box.

Your previews are very good, by the way. Much better than anything you’d see from a default expando. I’ll try the same.

There's certainly a system behind the scenes on twitter accounting for links-- I have many times your followers (80k)since I have abused the system (mostly though giveaways from my sponsor) my links often get many times fewer than hundreds of likes and tens of retweets.

You can experiment with the no link vs link thing for yourself by putting the link it a followup reply like some news accounts do btw.