When we launched Big Red Tin we didn’t set up Twitterfeed immediately.

With manual tweets we could customise the message to provide more details to Twitter users, one such tweet was:

We’ve defined a new term: Web 1.5 http://redt.in/b0KRut ^pw

– source: @bigredtin

We had Twitterfeed set up at this blog’s old location and took the opportunity to compare click-throughs from manual tweets versus automated tweets.

Manual tweets had a substantially higher click-through rate than the automated tweets. I suspect the reason for this is two fold:

• With so many people using Twitterfeed type services, Twitter users have learnt to ignore tweets that appear auto-generated.
• More information can be included in a manual tweet than might appear in an auto-tweet.

Take the post we were linking to earlier, had we been using Twitterfeed the tweet would have been ‘Blog Post: Web 1.5 http://redt.in/b0KRut‘. This provides so little information as to be next to useless. We would have ignored such a tweet out ourselves.

Many of the posts on this site are scheduled in advance, this allows us to publish at roughly the same time each week.

To schedule the associated tweets we use CoTweet. We have a couple of shared twitter accounts as it is, so CoTweet comes in handy for other purposes, but it’s the scheduling feature we use most of all.

If you use Twitterfeed yourself, try disabling it for a couple of weeks and manually tweet in its place. There’s a good chance you’ll be pleasantly surprised when you compare your bit.ly stats.

All statistics below relate to the period from opening night – December 10, ’08 – until mid March ’09; during this period there were 25,377 visitors leaving 96,867 page impressions.

Of the site statistics I have access to; SWTM provides an example of a site with a cross-section of visitors, from multiple age groups and backgrounds. This is all conjecture on my behalf; Google Analytics is yet to report sex, age group, and economic circumstances (but they’re probably working on it).

Nationality/Origin

It’s not surprising that most of the visitors to the SWTM website were Australian, 86.81%; the UK, the runner up with 6.29%, followed by the USA at 2.12%. Broadband propagation and technology use varies between nations; this should be kept in mind when viewing the statistic below.

Screen Resolution

I’m ignoring screen height in this section, it may occasionally be a factor, while width is almost always a factor. The most common screen width for visitors to SWTM was 1280px (42.97%), followed closely by 1024px (33.11%). 800px wide can safely be ignored at 1.91%.

Connection Speed

Google ‘google analytics connection speed‘ and the indications are that GA calculates the connection speed based on IP address, rather than running a speed test. I’m not sure this is the best method of calculating a user’s bandwidth, but I’m not an expert on these matters. The connection speed of 68.43% of visitors to SWTM are listed as unknown, I think this is too high for these results to provide anything other than a general indication.

Browsers

We’ve all paid the price of admission for one thing, browser stats; as web developers, we’re all hoping dearly that IE6 had less than one, five, ten percent, or, whatever your arbitrary threshold of market share is; unless that threshold is 25%, the actual stats are unlikely to make you happy:

They are the raw stats, I’ve not interpreted them in any way. I can’t imagine developing the Shane Warne the Musical site – I didn’t – and telling the producer that almost 1/4 of their visitors will be unable to get beyond the first page.

Elsewhere on this blog, commenters suggest demonstrating how much it cost to support IE6. It appears, and this is an interpretation, it’s worth just under 25% of the total development fee (or an additional 1/3 on top of the standards development). I hate saying this for two reasons a) the risk I’ll be branded an IE6 apologist, and, b) I hate developing for IE6 as much as the next person.

The high price tag for IE6 development does not rule out demonstrating the cost of development to your clients, if anything, it underlines the financial benefits of upgrading. Should you choose to go down this path, the difference between the worth and the cost of fully supporting IE6 may be a suitable starting point.

The Sydney season of Shane Warne the Musical opens at the Enmore Theatre on May 15, tickets from Ticketek. Disclosure: I’ve spent a lot of time around the inbreed mess that is the Melbourne comedy scene; the producers (Token Events) are clients of mine, and many of the staff are friends too.