After months, if not years, of anticipation and waiting Twitter Advertising is finally here. Although not available to the public yet, we were fortunate enough to be admitted as a beta advertiser and have had a few days to get familiar with the platform and experiment with a live campaign.
Here’s the short of it, Twitter Advertising is going to be the next best thing since Facebook Advertising. Just like the latter, Twitter Ads allow advertisers to pump up their followers and gain more exposure across the network through a real-time, simple to use dashboard. These two main goals are achieved through Twitter’s primary advertising solutions: Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets. As an added value benefit, Twitter advertisers receive verified account status (the little blue check mark next to a Twitter user name), which had been previously unavailable for the past year or so.
Despite the obvious benefits of being able to influence your reach within Twitter’s 200 million user-base, there are a few drawbacks to the platform in its current iteration. For one, the targeting options aren’t nearly as robust as Facebook. The Twitter representative we spoke with mentioned that geo-targeting was at the top of the priority list and should be available in the coming months. But aside from that, the only targeting option available currently is keyword based. Another issue is in the algorithm, or lack thereof, for determining actual costs. Unlike Facebook’s algorithm which bases advert cost partially on the success of ads (CTR), Twitter thus far has no way of providing advertisers lower costs based on audience reception. This, however, is another feature that Twitter insists will be coming shortly.
That said, the dollars and sense are pretty cut and dry at the moment. Promoted Accounts are based on a Cost Per Follow basis (with a minimum bid of $0.50), and Promoted Tweets allow the advertiser to select between Cost Per Engagement (CPE) and CPM. CPE advertisers will have a minimum bid of $0.10 and will be charged for any interaction with a tweet, including: clicks, RT’s, @replies and favorites. CPM advertisers will be charged by thousand impressions at a minimum of $1.00 per bid. Because Twitter Ads are still in beta mode, competition is light and we have been able to stay at the lower end of the bidding spectrum. We expect that costs will start climbing once competition increases with the public launch.
Our primary goal for the current campaign we are running is to increase follower count. Therefore, we have been experimenting with the Promoted Accounts service. Twitter’s analytics dashboard does not divulge actual cost per follow so we are forced to do the math ourselves. Thus far, we have been able to achieve slightly lower than a $0.50 cost per follow. Our assumption is that two things are happening. One, while current follows ring in at nearly 1,200, we have also secured 630 clicks. Twitter has not specified whether advertisers are charged for a click-then-follow, or if those follows are included in organic. Regardless, while we are most likely paying the $0.50 per follower that we have specified in our minimum bid, we are also gaining a higher volume of organic follows than our pre-advertising average, thus bringing down the overall CPF of the campaign. Unlike StumbleUpon advertising, however, Twitter analytics do not show organic pick-ups resulting from the ad campaign.
As hinted at above, Twitter does provide an analytics dashboard exclusive for advertisers. Although not nearly as robust as that of Facebook Insights, it does provide the basic information that an advertisers will require – Impression, click and follow data, charted out on a timeline. In addition, advertisers are also provided with a timeline of activity which shows the last 31 days of tweets along with the favorites, RT’s and replies for each. The Promoted Tweets dashboard provides a few additional data points including engagement data for each tweet being promoted.
According to Twitter, the full public roll-out of Twitter Advertising will most likely occur in Q2 of 2011. If you’re a current Facebook advertiser and feel that your business could achieve positive results from a larger presence within Twitter, I’d highly recommend that you keep abreast of this story and jump on your first opportunity to try it out. As mentioned above, the more advertisers in competition, the higher the bids will be. So get in early.
Want to learn how to become an expert at Facebook Advertising? Read our guide here.
Tags: Social Ads, Twitter Advertising
