Getting More Visibility On Twitter: Promoted Tweets

 

1 - Promoted-tweets-featured

Promoted Tweets is Twitter’s way of allowing advertisers to market to its audience in an extremely interactive way.

Unlike other advertising methods that feature more of an “Advertiser Talking At Audience” relationship, Promoted Tweets features a method that really tries to get the user to engage with the brand.

Here we’ll cover what a Promoted Tweet is, how the advertising structure works, who’s using it, what some of their results were and more.

To see the official Promoted Tweets page, visit:

http://business.twitter.com/advertise/promoted-tweets

 

WHERE DOES A PROMOTED TWEET APPEAR?

A Promoted Tweet appears along the top of search results. Much like Google AdWords, advertisers bid on search terms and keywords. Their Promoted Tweet will then appear along the top of the search results for that term.

Unlike other methods of advertising, a Promoted Tweet is both a normal tweet and a Promoted Tweet. In other words, an advertiser needs to first tweet it out as a normal tweet before promoting it. This prevents “advertising only” messages and encourages messages that are truly meant to provide value.

Here’s an example of how a Promoted Tweet might look like:

2 - promoted-tweets

 

THE NEW “PAY PER ENGAGEMENT” MODEL

In the past, online advertising typically followed one of two models: Pay per click (PPC) or pay per impressions (CPM). PPC allowed advertisers to pay for response, while CPM allowed brand advertisers to buy impressions in bulk.

Twitter’s new approach brings out something of a hybrid. You only pay when a user engages with your Promoted Tweet.

What is an engagement? An engagement is any action a user takes, including …

  • Retweeting your tweet.
  • Clicking on your tweet.
  • Replying to your tweet.
  • Favoriting your tweet.

This gives you the best of both worlds of both advertising models. Much like PPC, you don’t pay unless a user explicitly expresses interest in your message. Much like CPM, you’ll get your message exposed to a lot of people, unlike traditional PPC.

 

WHO’S ADVERTISING AND WHAT ARE THEIR RESULTS?

Though Twitter doesn’t publicize their number of advertisers, they did reveal that the project has over 30 large brand names and a larger number of smaller advertisers.

Their advertisers include companies like Virgin America, Starbucks, Best Buy, Red Bull, Zecco, Coca Cola and Sony Pictures.

3 - whos-advertising

What kind of results have these companies gotten?

According to Mashable and the Wall Street Journal, Coke reported that 6% of their audience was engaged in some way or another with the ad. Zecco and Virgin America have both reported very positive results.

On the other hand, not all advertisers who tested out a first round of advertising decided to continue. Best Buy for example discontinued after their initial test.

Will Promoted Tweets be a good investment for your company? It depends entirely on your audience, your brand strategy and your social media approach.

If you have an approach that values user engagement and brand loyalty, Promoted Tweets may be a powerful tool in your marketing. On the other hand, if instant sales are the most important thing, Promoted Tweets may or may not work, though you should certainly test it anyway.

 

WHAT KIND OF TWEETS WORK ON PROMOTED TWEETS?

The kinds of tweets that tend to get passed on with Promoted Tweets are the same kinds of tweets that tend to get passed on with normal tweets.

As Twitter put it: “Just like regular Tweets, the ones that users engage with most tend to be insightful, conversational, fresh and timely, and crafted for sharing.”

In other words, don’t write advertisements and hope they’ll work. Instead, write tweets that are designed to engage, promote those tweets and measure your performance.

4 - social-media-good

WRAPPING UP

You now know what Promoted Tweets are, where they appear, how the payment model works, who some of the advertisers and what their results were and what kind of tweets tend to work on Promoted Tweets.

Getting started on Promoted Twitter requires a marketing budget of at least $5,000 dollars a month. To get started, visit:

http://business.twitter.com/advertise/start