
Performance of a Paid Tweet - latitude
http://swapped.cc/blog/performance-of-a-paid-tweet
======
revelation
Maybe that is because your promo site is just terrible. There is literally
zero information on the landing page and then I have to keep clicking buttons
to read some text in a 100x20px box at the bottom of the screen. Thats a pain.

Maybe all of that is because I was expecting an actual project, not some fancy
graphics of something that launches soon (TM). I guess I just don't understand
what your goal is with this - it seems like you are wasting the novelty of
your project for some newsletter subscriptions.

~~~
latitude
Lovely feedback, thank you.

~~~
revelation
Sorry, I understand this comes off as harsh - but I think your time would be
much better spent previewing the actual product.

Even if I did spend all the time to read the tiny text (which is a huuuge bet
for users that click ads) I still wouldn't be much wiser to what your product
can do for me.

~~~
billpatrianakos
Though the page might not be effective as a landing page, only 12 click
throughs is still underwhelming for a promoted tweet. Now Notwerk has 12,000
new followers. So now I'm curious to see what would happen if the landing page
was reworked and then they put out a few well timed normal tweets. I'd guess
there'd be just about the same results but if it got more click throughs then
maybe the lesson is that social media ads just take a little more time to work
and do so in not so obvious ways. But it's just so hard to tell.

------
squarecat
How much should one new user cost?

(As an anecdotal sidenote: my work's firewall blocked the bsa.ly domain on the
basis of "adware".)

~~~
latitude
Not $100 :)

I've got a lot of subscribers through betali.st (can't recommend it enough)
and it costs me exactly 0. Reddit promoted post generated some subscriptions,
but these worked out to about $5 a piece. StumbleUpon cost was _+inf_ ,
because not a single Speedy Gonzales of theirs managed to stay on the site for
longer than 3 seconds, leave alone signing up.

I posted a bit more details on this earlier, have a look if curious -
[http://swapped.tumblr.com/post/22485539186/pre-launch-
promot...](http://swapped.tumblr.com/post/22485539186/pre-launch-promotion-in-
numbers-part-1)

(edit) And, why is this at -1?

~~~
Sodaware
Average time for StumbleUpon visitors on one of my sites is 1.5 minutes, but
others only get about 20 seconds of their attention.

I've found visitors from search engines tend to hang around longer, probably
because they were actually looking for something. Stumblers and some other
social networks are just looking for something to amuse themselves for a few
minutes, so tend to be pretty quick to leave.

Interesting write-up though, and I look forward to seeing how other
advertising methods perform.

------
mkammerer
Thanks for sharing the stats on your end. Advertising as a whole is a test and
check game. You test different placements, find what works, and continue on
that path. We have many advertisers very happy with their sponsored tweets
through BSA.

If you're interested we could help make recommendations of accounts that may
have a more relevant audience. Let me know if there is anything else we can
help with. Send us an email at support@buysellads.com if you'd like to discuss
further.

~~~
huhtenberg
I was considering buying paid tweets through your service and ultimately
decided against it. You shouldn't be forcing your own URL shortener on paid
tweet placements. If I don't care for your click reporting, I should be able
to opt out of it.

~~~
mkammerer
We can help with that. What benefit do you see to having t.co shorten your
links instead of us? :) A redirect is a redirect, no?

~~~
huhtenberg
t.co is Twitter's native shortener, so if anyone's parsing Twitter's data they
_will_ support it. Yours - not so much, e.g. see squarecat's comment on how
your domain is blacklisted by his content filtering firewall.

~~~
toddynho
we're not opposed to letting folks opt-out of our click tracking. i've added
this idea to a bucket within the queue for new ideas.

------
epoxyhockey
Is there any reason why you went through BuySellAds instead of using Twitter's
own promoted tweets platform? [http://advertising.twitter.com/2012/02/twitter-
advertising-f...](http://advertising.twitter.com/2012/02/twitter-advertising-
for-small.html)

I'm not in any way saying that your $100 would have been better spent, but it
seems like you would have a higher chance for success.

~~~
latitude
It's just an experiment, these aren't mutually exclusive. I will be trying
promoted tweets further down the line.

------
sakai
It needs to be said front that this is NOT Twitter's ad product, it's some
third party service (which likely just broadcasts to a large number of
followers for $100).

So, there's no targeting, and the pricing appears high for Twitter's standards
(which is priced in cost per engagement or CPE).

Please change the misleading title.

~~~
latitude
Twitter's ad product is called "Promoted tweets", and they are arguably far
less precisely targeted than when tweeting to the followers of a specific
account.

------
aklemm
Getting 1 in 12 onto your mailing list isn't bad (of course, the cost is too
high for those 12 clicks, but still). How is it targeted to followers? Do they
put the tweet in front of people that would care about it?

~~~
ceejayoz
This doesn't appear to be Twitter's ad product. It's someone (@NeowinFeed)
posting an ad on their Twitter stream for pay, so no targeting - all
@NeowinFeed's followers see it.

~~~
latitude
Yup, that's exactly it.

------
toddh
Your tweet didn't convey a compelling value proposition, so that may account
more for why the response wasn't as great as you wished.

------
phibit
This doesn't show that all paid tweets aren't effective, just that your
particular tweet campaign was not effective.

There are a lot of ways to take successful advertising channels and make them
perform poorly.

------
billpatrianakos
It really looks like social media marketing is just a whole lot of hype. It's
great for brand awareness but it's rare to see anyone report a boost in sales
from it. I've been working in web development, focusing primarily on small to
medium businesses looking for a web presence, and I haven't seen much success
in attracting new business on Twitter or Facebook. You may get some followers
or likes but they rarely, if ever, generate a single dollar.

People just don't care about you. They want to brag about their lives, create
personal brands, and spam you. Let's take an example business: an infant care
service that provides in home sleep training and help for new mothers who may
or may not have post-partem depression. So the theory goes that such a
business create social networking profiles, post cute baby pics, blog about
their services (giving readers advice they can implement themselves), become
an authority in their space, offer specials to followers and that will boost
their reputation. From there you branch out and begin buying ads and promoted
tweets and such to gain even more likes and followers and retweets. Well, it
ends up being a waste of time. Assuming that the people who run these types of
businesses have the time to do all this and/or the ability to work a computer
which many just don't, the end result of all that effort is to turn those
likes and follows into cash. But people don't care and even their followers
simply ignore their tweets and posts in their stream.

I've done some testing and I've found that many businesses do get a good
number of likes and follows but even when they do things right their tweeps
and friends don't respond as the theory says they should. You know what they
respond to? Stupid YouTube videos and cat pictures! On twitter and Facebook I
got several of these businesses in a good position as far as followers and
likes goes then did 4 weeks of experiments to see what people responded to.
The first week I posted informational, authority/credibility building stuff as
well as specials just for fans and followers. Then I alternated the second
week cat pics and mostly things "normal" people would post. So for four weeks
I alternated between a week of business related posts and a week of "normal"
people stuff and the results were that for the weeks I'd post a link to an
advice post in their blog or a fan-only discount each post would get 0 - 2
likes, comments, or click-troughs. For the other weeks they'd get between 15
and 40 likes, comments, retweets, or click-troughs.

So now I cringe whenever I hear about how businesses need to get in on the
social media party. It's a big fat scam in my opinion. People ignore your
grand opening, special event, discount, etc. but they sure love the random
viral videos and cat pictures. Turning clicks into dollars works for only a
very small portion of businesses online and that success is as much
attributable to luck as it is industry, location, customer base, budget and
size. This whole "every business needs go get in on the social media party"
thing has got to stop. We all know that there's a lot of nuance to getting it
right but the conventional wisdom, as it stands, is that all you need is a
facebook and twitter account, some followers, and you'll make money. It's so
wrong even for big companies as some have already found out.

~~~
lachyg
To provide a counter point, Twitter generated me 50% of a $10,000/month
revenue business. All I did was search for people discussing a topic, and
answer their questions. Sometimes I'd plug the product, but most of the time
I'd let them discover it naturally through our answers.

I tweeted about 1000 times a day.

~~~
timmaah
But thats ~6 hours a day tweeting for $5,000.

$5,000 a month is great, but where is the growth in it? Plus it leaves you
little time for much else.

There is little meat on the bone left over if you are paying someone to tweet
for you.

~~~
lachyg
That was very much part time, I could knock out 100 tweets in 10 minutes. I
would block them in 4-5 periods a day. It's incredibly quick, easy work.

~~~
coderdude
I'm assuming this is hyperbole, since that actually turns out to be like a
question answered every 6 seconds -- but what kind of questions were you
answering in volume like that? I'm curious because it seems to have had such a
large impact on your bottom line.

~~~
lachyg
People were discussing and asking questions about a book at a constant rate,
and I would catch up every few hours. It's not hyperbole.

