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Have you ever thought to youself, “I could get a huge amount of traffic to my site if I could just get some celebrity with millions of followers to tweet about it?”  A company had that dream realized but the results are less than spectacular.

Ashton Kutcher tweeted a video from a media company called Grumo Media who then posted a blog post detailing the impact of the celebrity tweet.  Although the writer of the blog post seems to be thrilled with the result, I find it to be very disappointing.  Why?

There has been a myth going around for a long time that says the more followers you have, the more traffic you can drive to a website.  While it is true that a tweet can drive traffic to your site (I do it all the time), the traffic is nowhere near the number of followers you have, especially if you have thousands or even millions of followers.  This is the perfect proof for that.  Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) has approximately 6.2 million twitter followers as of the writing of this post.  A single tweet from him was only able to send 13,000 people to view the video in question.  Only .2% of Ashton’s twitter following clicked on the link.  That is pretty sad considering celebrities make thousands of dollars with just a single tweet.  I think it is safe to say that you are better off spreading the word about a site or video or whatever in other places with a more targeted audience than hoping a celebrity will tweet you, especially if only .2% of their followers care enough to follow the link.

Its impossible to say why only 13,000 people clicked on the link but I have to think that is a pretty typical percentage.  Not everybody is going to be interested in content that is tweeted.  Not everybody will even see the tweet as many people aren’t as addicted to Twitter as some are.  These are just a couple of reasons why the click through rate might be so low.  Come to think of it, I would estimate my click through percentage on tweets to be about the same when you look at both my @globalgeeknews and @pcnerd37 twitter accounts (which you should be following).

What do you think of these numbers?  Considering the thousands of dollars that celebrities charge to tweet about a product, do you think it is a good return on investment?