Twitter has joined the advertising world of Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Earlier this month I mentioned how you could take advantage of American Express’s $100 promotion for small businesses on Twitter. But does it work? Yes. I signed up so that I could test it out and report back to you and also show you what it will look like once they roll it out to the masses. If you are interested, you can go to the Twitter for Business page and sign up there.
I did a little experiment and activated Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets for 48 hours for @tracysestili Twitter account.
| Growth | Organic | Twitter Ads (48 hrs) | % Change |
| Daily Avg. Twitter Follower Rate | 8-10 | 43 | 300% growth |
| Average Blog Clicks from Twitter | 14-17 | 106 | 524% growth |
Here’s how it works:
1. First you pick your target location. You can choose to promote your Twitter account or promoted tweets to: the entire world, specific countries, or to specific U.S. metropolitan areas.
2. Set your budget.
Depending on what you want to promote, if you want to get more clicks on your content and more eyeballs on your website, then you might choose to engage in Promoted Tweets. If your goal is to get more followers, then you may want to engage in Promoted Accounts or both. In either case, you set your budget in both areas and choose the max you want to spend per day. For Promoted Accounts you can also decide how much you are willing to spend per new follower. For Promoted Tweets you determine how much you want to spend per click.
The recommended dollar amounts from Twitter are between $0.50 – $2.50 for a new follower, and $0.50-$1.50 for a click.
3. Pick and choose which tweets get promoted.
You can pick and choose which of the five most recent tweets get promoted. If you choose to not promote a specific tweet it will pull up the next most recent tweet. There are always five tweets that it rotates to promote.
4. Add your credit card.
If you signed up for the free $100 American Express promotion, then you need to sign up with your American Express card to take advantage of it and to participate. However, you can change it afterward to Visa, MasterCard or American Express.
Again, if you are interested in taking advantage of Twitter ads, you can sign up on their Twitter for Business page.
Cool summary! I did this also, and was impressed with how easily it worked. I mainly took part for my own education, and I can see how this would be useful for certain clients, especially with well-timed tweets and select hashtag usage, depending on the target audience. One thing, though – it seemed a bit pricey for what you get, and especially considering the speed of traffic on Twitter. What do you think of their pricing?
Hi Richard, I thought that compared to the advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn that I actually got better results for what I was looking for. I agree, it’s a tad pricey at first look but I thought that the conversion was better. I just got a $50 credit from Facebook and am going to try them again in the new timeline and see if that makes a difference from before or in comparison to Twitter. I’ll let you know via a blog post. Thanks for the comment. Cheers.
Thanks for the information.have been struggling to put my blog out there