Promoted Accounts is one of Twitter’s three advertising platforms, this one specializing in helping you acquire new followers.
Tweeters find their friends many ways. Upon joining, many are encouraged to look through their Facebook or email accounts for people who are already on the site. They may also just browse the site and follow people who they find interesting.
Twitter also has a feature called “Who to Follow.” This is what it typically looks like:
When you’re a paying Promoted Accounts advertiser, your ad will instead be displayed in the Who to Follow box, along with a note indicating to users that yours is a promoted result rather than an organic result.
A RECOMMENDATION-BASED ALGORITHM
Unlike other advertising solutions, Promoted Accounts uses a special algorithm to determine whether or not you would be interested in seeing a particular advertiser’s message before showing it to you.
It does this both by analyzing your habits and by analyzing your friends’ interest. For example, if a lot of your friends are interested in video games, Twitter might infer that you’re also interested in video games. Therefore they might show you a Promoted Account advertisement from Xbox.
This prevents your ad from showing to people who genuinely aren’t interested in your product and helps you more finely target the people who might have followed you anyway if they knew about you.
THE PAY PER FOLLOWER MODEL
Promoted Accounts works on a pay per follower model. Instead of paying only for impressions, you only pay when people decide to follow you.
Of course, your follow rate needs to be sufficiently high for Twitter to be interested in continuing to offer you impressions.
According to Pierre Legrain, Product Marketing Manager at Twitter, the pricing per follower works on a bidding basis much like Google AdWords.
Legrain also says that most bids come in at between $.50 cents and $5 dollars. Other industry experts believe that most accepted bids really fall between the $1 and $3 dollar per follower range.
Legrain has also said that the “stay rate” and engagement level of paid followers are about the same as organic followers. In other words, there is no decrease in readership or drop in the average follow length just because someone’s following from a promoted source. (Source)
A LONG TERM STRATEGY
Unlike Promoted Tweets or Promoted Trends, which both lend themselves more to individual tweets or individual events, the pay per follower (CPF) model lends itself very well to being a long term rather than a short term strategy.
If you know what a follower is worth to your brand, you’ll know what you can pay on a CPF basis to acquire that follower.
Although every company should test it for themselves, if a paid follower is truly as valuable to you as an organic follower and you can profitably pay for Promoted Account followers, then this form of advertising could be a truly lucrative form of exposure for you and your company.
GETTING STARTED IN PROMOTED ACCOUNTS
To register as a Promoted Accounts advertiser, visit:
http://business.twitter.com/advertise/start