Should you advertise on Twitter?

Advertising on Twitter? What could possibly go wrong? I must admit, had the email from Twitter’s ever-optimistic marketing department not arrived while I was eating a Breakaway bar, I’d have probably binned it.

As it was, the invitation to try its new Ads system provided the perfect excuse to extend my chocolate break while pretending to work. I’m glad I did, since it turned out to be rather interesting.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Twitter’s new advertising system launched in the UK days after the company went public; it’s a profit-making morsel to toss to its new shareholders.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Twitter’s new advertising system launched in the UK days after the company went public – it’s a profit-making morsel to toss to its new shareholders.

At first glance, it offers the same promotional options as Facebook, but with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. Like its giant competitor, Twitter offers ad services to all its users – you don’t need a commercial account or a verified address – but Facebook only allows advertising to be created on behalf of Pages.

Whether this will become a problem remains to be seen, but I can’t shake the feeling that giving the power of global promotion to any teenager with his dad’s credit card might be a disaster waiting to happen.

Twitter offers two campaign types to its smaller advertisers: you can either promote your account to increase your follower count, or base your ads around an individual tweet. The idea of spending money simply to increase the number of people willing to receive my tweets makes my skin crawl; it’s the ultimate vanity project.

If you can demonstrate that each new devotee is expected to generate a profit, fair enough, but the vast majority of marketers don’t bother to work this out; if they did, I expect they’d be unable to justify the expense. I’ve calculated how much cash the average fan of my online retailer’s Facebook Page brings in, and as a result I rarely advertise on social media, since the cost per acquisition is too high.

Although I have a good idea of how much it costs me to attract a Facebook fan for a Page, I don’t know the equivalent figure for Twitter. If it turns out I can acquire followers for fractions of a penny each, it might be worth trying, considering there’s so little at stake. The only way to find out was to run a test.

The tweet-promotion campaign type has greater prima facie appeal, since it can be linked directly to a wider range of more valuable marketing outcomes.

For example, your tweet could contain a direct link to a product, a sales page or an email sign-up form. In fact, tweets are essentially text ads, with many of the same features and opportunities offered by Google AdWords. So I decided to test both a follower-acquisition campaign and promoted tweets – with mixed results.

Setting up a campaign

The simplest way to get started is by visiting http://ads.twitter.com.

After you’ve selected your country and time zone, Twitter asks which of the two campaign types you’d like to start with; since the promoted account type is simpler to set up, I started there. Once it’s set up, your Twitter account will appear in various places when users are looking for people to follow – in other words, a “promoted” account will appear before those that aren’t paid for. You pay only if a user actually follows you as a result of seeing the promoted suggestion.

All the ad settings are configured via a setup page, which Twitter pre-populates with defaults (you’ll want to change almost all of them if you don’t want to impoverish yourself). I had a fixed budget of £15 in mind for each experiment, so I constrained my spending by setting an expiry date three days hence; Twitter would prefer I kept it running forever.

Targeted accounts

The system allows you to target followers of other accounts, so if you were promoting sports equipment, you might choose football clubs, for example.

You can also elect to have Twitter promote your account to those it thinks are similar to your existing followers; given that you don’t pay unless they follow you, I don’t see any reason to avoid ticking that box.

Twitter also allows you to target accounts by interest, but if you’ve identified the appropriate usernames to target in the first place, there should be a lot of crossover.

To minimise the parameters in your experiment, consider restricting your campaign to a specific geographical location, even if you serve a global audience. I only ship within the UK, so I chose that location for my adverts. I also focused on a female audience, since this covers most of our customers.

Cost per follower

Finally, you’re invited to specify an overall budget for your campaign, a daily spending limit and a maximum bid per follower. Pay keen attention to these figures: although the first two are at your discretion, Twitter has an absurdly optimistic opinion of the value of each follower.

I laughed out loud at its suggestion of up to £2.20 per follow, a recommendation so utterly ludicrous that I almost stopped the experiment before it began. Were this realistic, I couldn’t expect to attract followers for any affordable amount.

Fortunately, years of AdWords experience has taught me that ad providers’ estimates are to be ignored, so I adjusted that down to a maximum of 45p. I still wouldn’t pay anything like that in the long term, but I needed to get enough data for this experiment, and Twitter predicted I’d reach just under one million users – a decent sample size, were it believable.

Easy to use

Sniggering aside, the developers at Twitter have put a lot of effort into the user interface and workflow involved in setting up and managing campaigns, making it the easiest of the major ad platforms to use.

In terms of sophistication, Twitter’s advertising is roughly on a par with Facebook’s and Bing’s, but it beats both for usability. It’s also much easier on the eye than Google’s AdWords interface, although it doesn’t come close to AdWords’ level of sophistication.

Once you’re up and running, you’re treated to a well-designed campaign control panel with which you can track the impact of your promotions. Twitter measures the effectiveness of each campaign using “engagement metrics”, which in the case of a promoted account equates to the number of new followers acquired.

I spent a total of £4.06 attracting 13 new followers for a “cost per acquisition” of 31p. My promoted account was seen almost 10,000 times and yielded a “follow rate” of 0.14%, which is low, but not untypical of Facebook’s equivalent ad type.

Puzzlingly, 11 of the new users followed me in the final hours of the campaign. Given the small amount of data so far, I can’t draw any concrete conclusions, except that it looks as though account promotion could be effective for adding new followers – at a cost.

Promoted tweets

For most practical purposes, promoted tweets are likely to be more useful to online marketers. Their main benefit is that they expose your tweets to any portion of the Twitter audience you choose, not only to your own followers. The tweets themselves behave like standard tweets, except for the addition of text that indicates they’ve been paid for.

The process of setting up a tweet campaign is much the same as for promoted accounts, although you can now choose to target your promotions at keywords, rather than followers of other Twitter accounts.

For example, you might time a promotion to coincide with an event such as the World Cup, targeting hashtags and keywords likely to be in use at that time. You can also target specific technology platforms; if you want your promotion to appear only to users browsing on Android tablets, you can do this.

Pick a tweet

Aside from setting a budget – and ignoring the ludicrous default bid – all that remains is to select a tweet, or series of tweets, to promote.

Again, don’t let Twitter choose for you; you should have already written and published the tweet you’re going to promote, so you can select it from the list.

For each promoted tweet, Twitter measures (and charges for) several types of engagement, including clicks, retweets and replies, and it’s these that you’re setting a bid price for.

Just to muddy the water a little, you pay only for direct engagements. For example, when someone retweets your promoted tweet, you’ll pay, but if that user’s followers then engage the tweet by clicking or sharing it among themselves, you don’t pay any extra. As a result, Twitter rather cheekily uses “effective cost per engagement” (eCPE) – which includes such freebies – as its main metric.

In many cases, you’ll be promoting a specific link to your website and including some sort of incentive to encourage the user to act before the tweet disappears from their stream.

Lead generation

However, Twitter has also introduced the Lead Generation Card, an entirely new way for users to interact with a tweet. The tweet itself invites the user to agree to share their email address with the tweeter, in return for an incentive.

The Lead Generation Card is by far the most interesting aspect of Twitter advertising

In other words, it’s a mailing-list opt-in form embedded in the Twitter stream. When the user clicks the link, the tweet expands to ensure they give explicit permission for sharing; if they agree, their email address is sent to the promoter.

Even more usefully, Twitter has set up integration with a range of services, including my favourite mailing-list provider MailChimp, which makes it possible to have these addresses added directly to your main email list. MailChimp is sophisticated enough to let you send different “welcome” emails to subscribers who arrive via Twitter rather than other sources, so the user receives a seamless, professional experience.

In fact, the Lead Generation Card is by far the most interesting aspect of Twitter advertising. I saw an instantaneous response, despite my low budget, and I achieved six sign-ups within a couple of minutes, followed by several more – some after my campaign had ended (and therefore free of charge). I can see from the control panel that 10% of the people who clicked the link to open the card agreed to share their email address, which is pretty respectable.

What’s profitable?

Unhelpfully, Twitter includes these clicks in its eCPE of 9p; a more sensible measure would be to divide the amount spent by the number of email-list sign-ups, including those that happened after the promotion took place. In my case, this would yield a real-world cost per email address of around 80p.

I could almost certainly reduce this significantly by experimenting with the wording of the tweet and the offer itself, but I wouldn’t expect much less than 50p.

The only way I’ll know whether that’s a profitable figure is by spending enough to attract around 100 Twitter email addresses and then analysing whether these people buy or not. Generally speaking, however, social media followers are less profitable than those who’ve been signed up via our blog or from within the shop itself.

I also ran a bog-standard campaign that offered a discount code and a link to our shop. Each click on that link cost us a promising 18p, but we recorded no sales using the code. Although this isn’t encouraging, I’d need to run the campaign for longer to acquire enough data to decide whether to add Twitter advertising to my arsenal.

Conclusion

Not surprisingly, Twitter isn’t set to replace AdWords as my primary promotional tool, although the platform has impressed me more than I anticipated (to be fair, my expectations were pretty low). Its user interface is well thought out, and makes it easy to add and manage campaigns, resulting in an experience that’s far less frustrating than Bing or Facebook.

You’re provided with no shortage of data on your campaign performance, although not all of its metrics are equally important, whatever Twitter might have you believe.

Twitter isn’t set to replace AdWords as my primary promotional tool, although the platform has impressed me more than I anticipated

As with all ad platforms, sticking with the default options is a fast track to the poorhouse, so if you’re not prepared to spend time working out a budget, targeting options and establishing the financial aims of your campaign, you’re best steering clear. That said, there’s an inherent advantage to being among the first to use a new platform, since you can capitalise before bid prices and user apathy increase.

I don’t recommend dismissing Twitter advertising out of hand: it may well have a part to play in driving traffic, sales and leads for some businesses in some situations.

For most online enterprises, however, more traditional forms of online marketing such as pay-per-click (PPC), display advertising and video promotion will remain far more important: don’t be distracted by the latest and shiniest.

This may sound like faint praise, but the fact Twitter advertising wasn’t dead on arrival is a surprise in itself. Who knows, one day it might merit being taken seriously.