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.

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.

Wow that is interesting regarding Twitter. It might be more useful longer term for customer engagement though?

Do you think it is specific to your market to suffer from this or is it a wider problem?

A lot of the problem is that many people seem to treat Twitter like a game where the aim is to get the most followers. People agree to follow back if you'll follow them. Therefore you get the ridiculous situation where people have 5000 followers and are following 5000 and obviously nobody really gives a damn about what anyone is saying.

Now when I'm deciding if it's worth pushing the app to someone on Twitter, I check if they have a rational following to followers ratio.

Even when following a normal amount of people on Twitter, the sheer amount of traffic means that your link will probably get lost in the feed.

I think Twitter has two key aspects.

The first is this general flow of information en masse. If you're at a party or other social event, it's like the general tone of the room. Have you ever been to a shotgun wedding? Or a corporate event where a huge success is being announced? You can walk in the room and get a sense that something good or unpopular is going on, just from the atmosphere. That's the mass twitter stream.

The second is the specific, targeted communities. My colleague down the hall is huge fan of horse racing. He curates a list of handicappers, jockeys, horse trainers and owners. If an important handicapper posts something, he's literally reading it in seconds. If my friend is following a specific horse race, he pays close attention to what race fans and trainers are saying about the horses.

If you're failing to get traction from Twitter, I would argue that you're getting lost in the stream -- you're one voice among many. You need to identify and figure out how to get in front of people who matter. That means that you need to be doing something real and useful -- not periodically tweeting some pitch.

Other social networks are similar. On Linkedin, for example, some people, especially recruiters, collect thousands of people like baseball cards, then mass-spam useless PR or other nonsense. That defeats the whole purpose of "social media"... social media is powerful because I trust and listen to people with whom I have a connection. If a friend or someone whom I respect says "Hey Duff -- you need to check this out, you'll love it", I'm there.

The app was posted to a Twitter account with 150,000 followers. A reach that large only produced 40 sales (0.027% conversion). OP is using it as an example of how ineffective Twitter is as a marketing avenue. It's not an example of cognitive dissonance.

... or indeed without reading, apparently.