What happens when a celebrity tastemaker tweets about a product? What is average celebrity tweet CTR? What countries do their followers live in? Given that we’ve spent many months in “stealth mode” building Swagsy, we were eager to find out.

Swagsy is a socially driven marketplace where tastemakers can share their favorite products and their fans can get great deals on those products. These tastemakers now have direct communication with audiences bigger than most TV shows – note that the cast of the Jersey Shore has more total combined Twitter followers than their highest rated episode ever got in total viewers.

But is anyone in the Twitter-sphere listening or do they care? 

Our assumption, of course, was Yes, celebrity tastemakers have loyal fans that value their opinions and someone is indeed listening on Twitter. Like any lean startup, we decided to test these assumptions, measure, and learn.

The Test

So we reached out to some of our agent contacts in Hollywood and set up a test with an up and coming female teen pop star that had just over 600,000 Twitter followers at the time of the test (we’ve decided to leave her unnamed). The plan was to have this tastemaker tweet about a product she liked using a third party click-tracking link so that we could mesure the results.

We had a lot of questions such as – what sort of CTR (clickthrough rate) will the tweet generate? Over what period of time will that traffic come? From what platforms?

Here are the results of one of our tests.

Our Findings

Clicks / Followers – 0.25% CTR

The tweet generated 1528 clicks in about 2 weeks with the large majority of traffic coming during the first day. This equates to approximately  0.25% CTR when dividing clicks over Twitter follower count.

Unexpected Link Building Benefits

It was surprising to see a long tail of clicks continuing to come weeks after the initial test. We had initially assumed that the link would be buried quickly and nobody would ever see it again. However, it seems that celebrity tweets are highly syndicated online and you actually end up getting lots of referrals from sites other than Twitter.

Optimize for Mobile – 56% of Referrals from Mobile Browsers

We were very surprised to see how much of Twitter’s referrals were coming from mobile. 56% of the referrals came from mobile browsers! This made us rethink our product strategy and after weighing the option of building a dedicated mobile user experience while trying to bring a desktop minimum viable product to market, we decided to build a responsive HTML5 web interface that would adapt to any device.

Here is a more detailed browser breakdown.

And here is a more detailed OS breakdown.

Think Global – 73% of Referrals from United States

The geographic breakdown was inline with what we expected. This particular tastemaker is an up and coming pop star in the United States and has not yet broke out globally. But it’s interesting to note that almost 30% of referrals were from non US residents.

Lots of Fake and Inactive Accounts

Another important metric to look at is how many of their followers are even real followers. Thankfully StatusPeople came out with a cool little tool that lests you do just that. Here are the results of this influencer’s StatusPeople analysis:

Believe it or not, this is actually a pretty good score for someone that is so high profile. Business Insider did a quick slideshow analyzing the top 15 most popular Twitter users and the numbers look a lot worse. This is likely due to a Twitter pushing these high profile accounts into new user’s faces (instead of helping the new user discover people that fit their interests). Additionally, all the spam bots on Twitter are most likely finding these accounts very quickly.

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