Twitter Begins Selling Advertising: How You Can Use It

6 replies
Hello Fellow Warrior,

Twitter just turned 5 and has reached the point where it must begin to show revenues or forever be labeled as a hobby startup. The company has raised millions in capital through investors, but has yet to show any real profit after years of being online and skyrocketing popularity over the past year.

A few months ago, Twitter quietly rolled out an advertising product called Promoted Tweets. To say it's flopped would be an understatement. So the social mini-blog service is rolling out complementary offers for advertisers to build on that.

=== How Advertising With Twitter Works

The way Promoted Tweets works is similar to Google's AdWords ads. A tweet block is purchased and then served as users search for terms that match the ad or through Twitter's proprietary access software, HootSuite. This greatly limits the number of people who will potentially see the ad and is the largest reason for the offerings failure so far.

Until now, this has been one of only two ways to advertise on Twitter. The other, Promoted Trends, has been a lot more successful as companies or groups purchase 'hash trends' (sort of like keywords which include the '#' mark in front of them, e.g. #TwinkieLove). These trends could be extremely effective, since Twitter would promote them heavily - hashes are how users group tweets together to make them easier to search.

The problem with Promoted Trends is the price tag. The average is around $100,000 or more and Twitter only sells one slot per day - that price is daily, by the way. This promoted hash trend is shown on Twitter's 'trends' section on user pages and can create a huge influx of traffic for the advertiser.

For most of us, though, 100 large is out of the question.

Late last year, Twitter announced another advertising method: Promoted Accounts. These are basically Twitter user accounts tailored for businesses or causes that are promoted by Twitter on a pay-per-follower basis. So instead of going out to find your own followers, you are promoted on Twitter's signup sequence as someone to follow automatically and on the site's 'Who To Follow' feature page.

This is affordable, but still limited in its use.

That's changing.

=== Twitter is Combining Promoted Accounts and Tweets

The combination is suggested by Twitter's ad team to be a 4:1 ratio and to expect an engagement rate of 1 to 3 percent. If that rate is correct, that's a phenomenal return for any sort of Internet advertising. The ratio is explained like this:

The Promoted Account should be funded at 80% of total budget in order to build the follower base of the account. That should be augmented with the other 20% being put into paid tweets. The Promoted Tweets directly advertise the business while the Promoted Account builds the businesses follower base to make non-paid tweets more effective. Over time, this 4:1 ratio can be changed or the Promoted Tweets dropped altogether, depending on the advertiser's goals.

Of course, not all of this is rosy. The cost could be pretty high, though to be competitive, Twitter will have to keep it within reason and competitive with Google. So far, they haven't announced solid pricing plans, but will likely do so shortly.

Further, Promoted Tweets will become more useful because Twitter has announced that they plan to roll these out to cover all of the technology's platform ñ so these ads would appear in user's Twitter streams, on the site's main pages, and more. Twitter acknowledges that this will probably make some users angry, resulting in some advertisers receiving negative feedback.

If other sites who've rolled out advertising in recent years (after being relatively ad-free) are any indication, using Google as an example, then the negative uproar from the small percentage of users who get angry will last a short while and then abate. People get used to things fairly quickly on the Internet and everyone understands that companies, even those offering free services, have to pay the bills somehow.

Overall, a small business with the budget to invest modestly into Twitter advertising could see some great returns. Twitter has banned test advertisers from publicly talking about their experiences so far, so there isn't much information on how it's actually performing yet. Given the well-established user base and newness of the advertising addition to Twitter, though, the potential is gigantic.

I'd love to hear what you think.
#advertising #begins #selling #twitter
  • Profile picture of the author laurenswuyts
    Wow this is great! I hope it will be so great as facebook ads
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  • Profile picture of the author krjewellers
    I missed the boat on Twitter. I just started and I'm making
    friends and sales. I should have started sooner. I would
    be interested in advertising on Twitter if its affordable.
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    • Profile picture of the author Clyde Dennis
      Originally Posted by krjewellers View Post

      I missed the boat on Twitter. I just started and I'm making
      friends and sales. I should have started sooner. I would
      be interested in advertising on Twitter if its affordable.
      You can promote your product, service, website or blog on Twitter for as little as $5.00 at TweetDotCom
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  • Profile picture of the author entrepreneurjay
    I have yet to run a paid ad on Twitter I think I am gonna see how profitable it is or is not? Thanks for the update.
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    • Profile picture of the author jamesburchill
      Personally I don't think we will see advertising like that of Facebook, but I do expect to see more commercially viable options.

      That being said, a recent report indicated Twitter was not as social as some predicted and had become more of a broadcast platform (well duh!)

      Either way, it's popular and I'm confident that the ability to add a commercial angle to the messaging will serve its purpose.

      By the way, I'm a huge fan of Twitter (@jamesburchill) and as of this morning I have just over 13,600 followers. Twitter is part of my Social Fusion Formula and works wonderfully.
      Signature
      James Burchill ~ Bestselling Author & Coursepreneur
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  • Profile picture of the author DomainFlipClub
    I hope they setup a PPC ad network so that we target certain interests and demographics.
    Signature

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