Advertising is everywhere, from the logo on the computer you are using to view this post to the sidebar of this blog. Back in March 2006 when Twitter was launched it was a misunderstood product but, that did not stop it from rapidly gaining prominence by helping promote presidential campaigns to making bloggers “digital celebrities”. Most importantly it was advertisement and, to a certain extent, spam free.
That is not the case today.
While Twitter itself was late to its own party, by not launching any revenue generation scheme till mid 2010, this did not deter others to enter, at the time, this highly lucrative market.
Sponsored Tweets was perhaps the first company to offer a platform to advertisers to pay twitter users for a tweet. The concept has since then evolved to include a myriad of segmentation options, advertising models and even custom campaigns featuring celebrities.
But is it all really worth it to the advertiser?
Table Of Contents
WP Auctions Case Study
For those of you who don’t know, Weborithm develops a WordPress plugin called WP Auctions. It allows anyone to host personal auctions on their WordPress powered site. We recently released version 4.0 of the plugin and decided to use Sponsored Tweets (ST) to help get the word out and possibly make some sales.
Please note: We had won some free credits to use with ST, hence our liberal selection of “tweeters” for this campaign.
How does Sponsored Tweets work?
I’ll just go over very briefly how ST works with some supporting images.
1. You first enter the title, instructions and the URL of the product/site you wish to promote.
A BIG point to note here is that some tweeters will literally just tweet out the instructions you write. Yes, it has happened before in campaigns we’ve run on ST. Knowing full well the amount of creativity, read non-existent, tweeters have put in my past campaigns I decided to just go with text that they could copy and paste.
2. Here is the price selection feature where you can select what prices you want to set and even choose a few select twitter users you wish to invite.
3. Next, you choose more specific targeting like tags, countries and the time you wish for your tweets to be broadcast.
Once you’re done with the above steps you confirm your selections and your campaign is underway!
The Case Study Results
We choose some high profile tweeters along with others who had a large follower count. We’ve done other campaigns on ST, again with those free credits, that used their Pay Per Click model. In the Pay Per Click model you go through the same set up process above but instead you post a price you are willing to pay per click to a tweeter. The amount you pay depends on the clicks you get, almost exactly like the Google AdWords program.
In the above case we used the Pay Per Tweet model, i.e you pay per tweet rather than per click your link gets. The model does take the cost per click into account, which means your tweet may be sent out more than once via a tweeter’s profile.
CPC – Why it’s flawed on Sponsored Tweets
As you can see above it took some tweeters almost 3 tweets before they could reach the required CPC as determined by their history on the platform.
This is heavily flawed because there is a huge chance that most of the clicks will overlap from the previous tweets sent out. ST may have some checks in place to discount repeat clicks from the same users, but I highly doubt it.
Cost effectiveness
Having an overall CPC of $1.39 is simply way too high for any advertiser to see ST, and Twitter, as a long term advertising strategy.
If I were to actually spend the amount of money I spent with ST on Google Adwords or buying ad spots on popular blogs I would have easily made it last up to a month, probably more, and had an effective CPC of around $0.15 – $0.30 generating anywhere from 4000 – 3000 clicks.
Anyone can clearly see what would be a more effective medium.
Show me the money!
What?…What money?
Our grand total in sales from this campaign: $0
Now, before people jump in say that our product might not be cool enough, that’s not really the point of this post. But do know that we’ve been selling it quite successfully for the past 4 years taking into account how much actual time (very little) we spend on developing it. We solely develop it in our free time, me and my core developer have otherwise full time gigs.
In Conclusion
My experience with Sponsored Tweets could have used a lot of other variables to help the campaign like split testing, ad copy variations etc… Though, I doubt this is a medium one would use to test those variables. At best, I believe, Sponsored Tweets can only ever be used to promote offers that have gone through a testing phase and one that can make an impact on a twitter user who probably has the world’s shortest attention span of 0.140 seconds.
I believe the time is ripe though for twitter users, with high profile counts, to jump on the bandwagon and make away with some easy cash before this medium is overtaken by the next great social phenomenon.
Have you ever used twitter to advertise your product, i.e actually pay for a tweet? If so, share your experience in the comments and let us know about it.
Special Offer for Readers of this Blog!
Chris was able to find out where I live and gave me an offer “I couldn’t refuse”. So here is 20% off to anyone entering the coupon code “CHRIS” when you buy the WP Auctions plugin.
As a bonus offer, again “I couldn’t refuse”, I’m offering* any WordPress theme from my library on Mojo-Themes to anyone who buys the plugin with the code above completely FREE!
This offer expires at the end of July.
*Theme will be provided without updates or support.
Hey Hyder,
Thanks for doing this guest post. I don’t like to write my comments inside guest posts so I thought I’d chime in here.
I think that Sponsored Tweets is probably better for spreading brand awareness than converting sales. The fact that you didn’t even get a single sale was very surprising to me based on the people that were tweeting the ad out were all in a relevant industry.
But perhaps that’s what more advertisers are doing these days is just focusing on trying to build brand awareness?
Chris
Yep, I would imagine the same. It’s a good platform to help promote an already existing brand and create an heightened awareness about it.
I hope the next time someone thinks of “auctions” with “WordPress” they think of WP Auctions!
Yah, I bet the biggest advertisers are huge companies like Nike, etc.
that was an excellent post! I am feeling awesome and gloaty and also smug because I already knew that sponsored tweets are no value if you’re trying to sell stuff directly. Brand awareness? sure! a great way to empty your pockets? definitely!
asking a twitter user to part with cash? haha, you can find much more value in almost any other type of advertising (which I have found out to my own expense and I didn’t have free credits, dammit!) 😛
good luck with wp-auctions!
Oh dang, you already tried paid advertising for Twitter eh?
Hi,
A great topic to cover and I was very interested as I’ve used twitter for a number of years. I must admit I wasn’t surprised by the results. I think I would focus my brand awareness time building via other means though.
I have a small business tech blog and weekly I publish guest posts, which also happen to be tweeted out to almost 10,000 people. Nobody pays for their guest post and nobody pays for the tweet.
Now take this guest post on Chris’s blog. I see Chris as an authority on websites and related topics and I’m subscribed to the blog. If Chris has allowed a guest post and the topic interests me I will read.
So I think a good solid guest posting strategy, coupled with building a strong consistent twitter account is superior to paying for tweets. Then if your guest post is tweeted, retweeted it is hopefully mentioned by people with strong twitter followings with people following interested in the topic.
I’m tired, so hopefully my comment made some sort of sense!
I’m curious about the auction plugin, so after breakfast I will take a look. As mentioned, good luck with wp-auctions.
Andrew
Hey Andrew,
I do think that yes Guest Posting can be very useful, but just paying for tweets within the context of trying to drive sales is why I wanted my friend Hyder to write about his results. I didn’t know at the time he didn’t get any sales from those tweets, but I suspected it would be low.
Very interesting…
Chris
I wonder if he could have converted at least one with an optimized tweet and landing page. I think he could have closed one sale if he created a landing page specifically for those tweets. Welcome the user, describe the product, describe the terms of the “limited time” and then ask for the sale.
One thing that I thought about is that you might not want to offer a 20% discount on the tweet. Instead, mention your product and have them directed to a landing page with a free email course on how auctions can dramatically boost your income. Once the course is over, people will understand why they must buy the auction and they will trust you to deliver.
Some great points! As I mentioned in my post, yes I could have done some prior testing and used more variables to get a better bang out of the promotion.
Nevertheless, it’s a lesson learned and if nothing else it will serve as a reminder to people on what not to do. Especially when they are using real money to pay for it.
Thanks for sharing this case study about ST, I had never been on the advertiser end of it, and I’m not sure I will ever be, specially after your experience.
I’m not a big brand so I have no need to just get promotion for my brand, I need sales, and if it can’t convert than I’m not interested. I may consider trying the cost per click, but if you’re using big name tweeters (like John Chow and Shoemoney) I’m sure people will click by curiosity, but will they buy? I guess that depends on your product.
Thanks for posting this. I think as the others do that paying for Tweets is more for brand awareness and I can only really see this making sense for large companies who have the money to spend since I think it would be difficult to gauge how effective your sponsored Tweets are for your brand. But if Twitter could take this and develop an analytics tool along with their own version of sponsored Tweets maybe this could be used just like Google Adwords.
interesting topic! paying for tweets is a sure way to earn money but i don’t think it’s good… maybe because social media is one of the most effective way people can reach out.. and why let them pay for that?
I saw a lot of people buying twitts directly from twitters with 2000+ flowers. But I simply to see the point, there are many people using twitter, but there are as many bots and fake accounts made specially for advertisement. From 2000+ follower usually only 10 are real people interested in your content, that’s extremely low if you ask me. So why bother with ads on twitter, it will eventually die anyway.