How to Spend $100 in 2 minutes…Use Twitter’s Promoted Products

January 25, 2011 | by | Category:

Day 1 Recap: Lessons in Using Twitter’s Promoted Products

We’re very excited to announce that we’ll be participating in Twitter’s Promoted Products program for the next three months. Yesterday was our first day trying out the Promoted Tweets & Accounts beta on the Optify account, and we’ve learned a lot in just 24 hours! The onboarding process was made relatively easy by Twitter with the help of their Promoted Products management team and a live, introductory webinar. Now that we’re testing various Promoted Tweets and starting to roll out our Promoted Accounts campaign, the real learning begins.

Promoted Tweets & Accounts: What Are They & How Do They Work?

While you’ve probably started seeing Promoted Tweets and Accounts when logged into your Twitter account, you might be wondering how Twitter decides which users to target and how advertisers go about advertising through the Promoted Products platform. Here’s a quick overview to answer some of those questions:

This breakdown isn’t meant to cover all details of Promoted Products, but is just meant to serve as a brief description of the program.

Who will see these?

  • Promoted Tweets & Accounts: Twitter only targets users who aren’t already following your account, but who follow accounts similar to yours.
  • Promoted Tweets: Advertisers have the option to further filter their audience by choosing specific keywords to target users based on their searches or interests.
  • Promoted Accounts: You can further target users based on what they’re interested in.

Where do users see these?

How do you use it?

  • Promoted Tweets: Tweets that you’ve pushed out to your followers will automatically resurface in your Promoted Products Campaign center, where you can click “Add” under Promoted Tweets, if you wish to promote it.
  • Promoted Accounts: Simply select Promoted Accounts from the drop-down menu when building a new campaign, assign audience targeting criteria and set your campaign budget. Twitter will pull from your account’s avatar and create a Promoted Account icon for you.

How do you monitor your success?

  • Promoted Tweets: Twitter’s Analytics provide realtime data on your users’ engagement with each Promoted Tweet, including insights on number of impressions, clicks, replies, RTs and favorites, as well as what time users were most engaged based on a time range of your choosing (e.g. “Last 60 minutes” or “This month”).
  • Promoted Accounts: Realtime data for impressions, clicks and follows, as well as the option to see user interactions right down to a specific 6-hour time span.
  • Timeline Activity: Overview of all your tweets, both organic and Promoted. This feature gives advertisers insights as to what Twitter’s Resonance Algorithm considers your “Best” and “Good” tweets, number of replies, retweets, clicks, mentions of your username, favorites, follows, unfollows, etc. Additionally, the Timeline displays “badges” when a tweet is performing high above your average performance (e.g. “5x normal reach”).

5 Initial Takeaways From Our First Day Using Twitter’s Promoted Products:

Here’s a quick glimpse at some of our key learnings from Day 1:

  1. Promoted Accounts resonates extremely well with users. It’s important to keep a careful watch on your campaign and have a specific marketing budget outlined before you begin. Less than two minutes after starting our Promoted Accounts campaign yesterday, we spent $100. Granted, we saw over 50 new followers to the Optify account and nearly 70K impressions in that time period as well. The minimum bid per follower is $0.50, yet the average bid (and the bid that will likely win you followers) is $1-$2.
  2. Right off the bat in our introductory webinar, Twitter recommended a 5:1 ratio, Promoted Accounts to Promoted Tweets. While Promoted Accounts is generating impressions for a large number of Twitter’s user base, Promoted Tweets hasn’t finished rolling out just yet. We saw this for ourselves yesterday. Pre-launch we had 1065 followers, but by end of day after running Promoted Accounts for less than 30 minutes and then stopping it, we had bumped up to 1138 followers. As for Promoted Tweets, we saw just under 3,000 impressions for one campaign, 3 mentions and 0.5% engagement. While Promoted Accounts can pretty much be set on cruise control (with the right campaign budget in place), Promoted Tweets will require a lot of trial and error testing.
  3. We asked during our webinar whether users on the old version of Twitter would see our Promoted Accounts, but apparently the Who to Follow widget is specific to the new Twitter. Yet, Twitter told us that 90% of users have converted to the new Twitter and they expect the rest to be fully converted soon.
  4. One issue we’ve had so far is that it appears liked there’s no way to pause a campaign. We worked around the issue by scheduling our Promoted Accounts campaign to start at a later date, although this resulted in the Promoted Accounts tab, which we saw along the top navigation bar to start, disappearing from our Campaign center. When we asked Twitter about the issue in the webinar, they said it sounded like an isolated incident specific to us.
  5. In keeping with their promised offering of “Realtime Analytics,” Twitter provides several insightful features inside their Timeline Activity feature. If a tweet was retweeted or replied to, a RT or reply symbol will appear inline with that specific tweet, which offers a hover option to see the user’s name and number of followers. For replies, Twitter also allows you to click through to Twitter.com and see that user’s response.

Stay Tuned for More Updates about Promoted Products:

As Twitter’s Promoted Products is still in beta and just starting to roll out to a larger set of advertisers, people have a lot of questions about best practices and how effective Twitter advertising really is. We’ll be documenting our experience along the way and sharing it with you on a regular basis, so stay tuned for more updates!

Follow us on Twitter to get live updates on our experience going forward with Promoted Products.