A Couple Bucks and a Few Hundred Follows: A Viral Tweet Isn’t Worth Much [OneZero]

Going viral on Twitter feels good, but it doesn’t pay.

Going viral can feel good, especially on a platform like Twitter, which has a peculiarly low engagement rate: If more than 0.5% of the people who follow you engage with your content, that’s considered a good engagement metric.

But how much is a viral tweet actually worth monetarily? The author reached out to the owners of several viral tweets to ask what they made off the back of their virality. All the accounts were unverified and had fewer than 5K followers before the viral tweet. Four of their owners responded, and here’s what they said about the experience of going viral.

@andromediart made around $30 for her tweet that got more than 500K likes and nearly 100K retweets, even though she had her Etsy shop link in her bio. She also gained about 600 followers.

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Twitter user @MelissaTheDuffy was offered a $10 brand sponsorship deal, plus the offer to potentially repost her tweet on the @FuckJerry Instagram account for $50. (They did not get back to her.) Duffy’s account also grew by around 1,000 followers.

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If you’re hoping for virality because you expect massive growth in followers and an inflow of revenue, you should reconsider. First, the likelihood of going viral is minuscule. Second, once it happens, the results are laughable. There are always exceptions, of course, but this is the norm.

21+ High Quality SaaS Marketing Case Studies. [dansiepen.io]

A curation of the best in-depth SaaS Case Studies that all founders & marketers should read.

Top 3: Canva, Xero, Active Campaign.

But there are many more: Autopilot, Buffer, ConvertKit, Slack, Pinterest, Spotify, Zapier, Notion etc.

How to audit Core Web Vitals [Search Engine Land]

A step-by-step process to identify problems and prioritize fixes ahead of the Page Experience Update.

By May 2021, Core Web Vitals will become a part of Google’s ranking algorithm. The time to take action on the aptly named Page Experience Update is now.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics used to measure a website’s loading, interactivity and visual stability. All three are related to site speed in one way or another, which is something we know has been important for both search engines and users for a very long time.

Here are the metrics that need to be analyzed in a Core Web Vitals audit:

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The article details how to perform a thorough Core Web Vitals audit, which should make you well-prepared when the Page Experience Update goes live.

6 Ways to Improve the Relevance of Cross-Sells in the Cart (52% of Desktop Sites Don’t Do Enough) [Baymard Institute]

Presenting cross-sells in the cart, or right after a product has been added to the cart, can enhance and streamline the user’s shopping experience.

Recommending products at this point in the purchase process can also increase the average order value by bringing additional items of interest to users’ attention.

However, the usefulness of cross-sells is directly linked to their relevance to the user’s cart contents.

Users are quick to dismiss recommended products and offers that are not obviously related or applicable to the product(s) they are purchasing.

Yet, 52% of desktop sites we benchmarked present cross-sells in the cart, or in the “Added to Cart” confirmation, that are either completely irrelevant or based only on what other customers bought.

The article discusses 6 ways e-commerce sites can ensure cross-selling in the cart is meaningful and relevant for users:

  • Avoid listing a fixed number of product suggestions
  • Be cautious about listing alternative products
  • Provide clear labels that define the context to the user
  • Prioritize products of the same theme
  • Give precedence to compatibility-dependent items
  • Consider the user’s context when promoting special offers

Try to avoid offering a toilet when someone wants to buy a spare part:

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Is A/B Testing Effective? Evidence from 35,000 Startups [Harvard Business School]

A/B tests help startup founders capitalize on good ideas—and move on from duds—faster, says research from Rembrand Koning.

Hmmm, who would have thought? 🤔

We should be long past having to prove the usefulness of A/B testing. Yet, we’re not, if the studies like this still have to come out. On the other hand, if there’s a need for that, then it’s good that this need is answered. The more people learn the usefulness of CRO and testing, from all possible sources, the better.

For those who actually do A/B testing, the study contains exactly zero surprises. For those who don’t, hopefully, they’ll learn something.

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Until next Thursday!

Radek Sienkiewicz

PS. Cross-selling and upselling is notoriously hard to do properly. Even Amazon, with all their data, their data science teams and capacity, best they can offer is something along the lines of “Oh, you’ve bought a vacuum cleaner? Here are 10 other vacuum cleaners for you to consider”.