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I've found a similar thing with many forms of social media. My business site gets 500-1000 views a day with a 30-40% bounce rate. Two days ago, we got 5500 views with an 80% bounce rate -- turns out, we got featured on Reddit and were reasonably popular, but people just aren't interested in viewing your site or buying anything, they want to click, see it, be entertained, and move on.

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That's another problem.

However, my experience with Twitter is that people don't even click the link in the first place. I used to go through people's twitter feeds, people with thousands of followers, and look at the bit.ly stats for their links. It was rare to see any link clicked more than maybe 5 times. More often than not, it was precisely zero.

Unfortunately, t.co has made that game less easy.

My conclusion from bit.ly stats for my app's Twitter feed with 130 followers and my own behavior is that people use Twitter to read tweets, not to click on links. Especially on my iPhone but also on a laptop, I can read 10+ tweets in the time it takes me to follow and read one link, where I don't know what I'll find. So if you want people to read what you've written, put it into the tweet.

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