I have had the luxury of having quite a bit of experience watching an ad platform evolve from the ground up having been at Microsoft Advertising in the launch days of adCenter. It’s not an easy task to build a platform to accomodate that much data and users. Many of these plastforms, even the Microsofts and Googles of the world experience growing pains in figuring out how to deliver value and a strong user experience. It takes time. And Twitter needs A LOT more time.
On the work front, we’ve managed our fair share of ad campaigns on a variety of search and social networks all with their advantages and disadvantages. We’ve recently started to experiment with Twitter Advertising having finally been invited to the platform to see if it could be a viable offering for some of our clients. We launched a promoted account campaign to see if we could bolster our following.
Wanna see the reporting we have access to?
That’s the “detailed view”. Apparently 12.3K impressions aren’t enough to qualify for a chart either. I didn’t realize dynamic chart rendering was at a premium these days.
Our targeting options consist solely of location. I understand technically the program is in Beta, but this is more like Alpha. Or whatever comes before that. Twitter’s explanations of who your ads and promoted tweets show up to are very vague as well.
There also doesn’t seem to be any ad segmentation options either. Overall, the ad platform is extremely generic and narrow in its focus. Without any real control over what is happening, you’re basically just throwing money at Twitter in hopes that you produce some affordable results. In our case, we ended up paying $80 for what appears to be 48 new followers. Not the worst results in the world from a pure follower/like acquisition cost, but then again, we’re not entirely sure which folks we picked up from the campaign.
Word on the street is that the bigger brands have access to a much more robust ad platform and I certainly hope they open this up to us smaller folks. In the meantime, I don’t see any value in continuing use of the platform until they do.
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Advertising is really expensive for the little guy especially when you don’t have access to the same opportunity as larger orgainization. That would be awesome if they opened up the same things for everyone.
I get better value with the social networking advertising methods I’ve learned. Find me on facebook if you wanna know more!
Twitter, I’ve heard, is the third largest search engine today and anyone can have a presence there. Twitters limited 140 characters per tweets has so far not allowed for an effective “Call-To-Action” for Advertisers, Merchants, or Brands who basically use the space for Branding or informational purposes only. However, there is a new mobile marketing model designed by CouponPhone specifically for Twitter Advertising that overcomes the space limitations that Twitter has. The model uses a feature called “Mobile-Call-4-Text” where a mobile user calls a unique # that is associated with a specific coupon, or other value added proposition, then automatically received the coupon on their mobile phone. The best way to understand it is to try it. Using a mobile phone call 1-866-410-7388 and you will get a GameStop coupon in the form of a QR code sent directly to your cell phone. This is for demonstration purposes only. For example: a tweet that GameStop could send to its 264,000 loyal followers could go something like this:
@GameStop-Heading to the mall? From your Mobile dial CouponPhone # 1-866-410-7388 we’ll text you a $10 coupon for your game purchase!
To learn more watch http://vimeo.com/26750018
Hi Jason,
I find it incredibly disappointing that smaller businesses can’t get the same (or at least a little better) results than you did using Twitter Advertising! There are other free programs that, although they don’t necessarily “promote” or “advertise” you to users, automatically have people follow you–it sounds as though one of these programs would be more effective for the little guys. What do you think?
Has Twitter Advertising had any improvement since you created this post?
Thanks!
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Ads are great but too much will have users migrating to other services.
Awesome post Jason. I’m doing a preso on Twitter marketing tomorrow and I know I’m going to get asked about Twitter advertising. You’ve confirmed very nicely what I was already thinking. Thanks for a great post!
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