5 Tips For Advertising With Sponsored Tweets
At this point I don’t think there are too many people who have not heard of Twitter. It rose to huge visibility during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, November 2008. People caught in the tragedy were actually posting updates on twitter as events unfolded, information was coming out faster on twitter than CNN and other news networks. This fact on the news a day later is what brought attention from the masses and from then on, it has caught on like wildfire. Today it’s a huge marketing tool.
Twitter Marketing Power
When you have an audience of 4,000,000 people or 50,000 people, in the marketing and advertising world that is a gold mine. Imagine the amount of money an advertiser would pay to someone like Ashton Kutcher who at this moment has almost 4.2 million followers. If you had a blog or a site and he were to post a link to it, the hurricane of traffic you would receive would topple many web servers. That commands power and certainly money.
Paid Advertising With Twitter
So you don’t have 4.2 million followers, how about 50k, or maybe even 500. There are Twitter ad networks who will connect people who are willing to buy tweets, with someone who is willing to sell their tweets.
These networks allow advertisers to connect with people willing to tweet about them in exchange for money. Depending on your twitter profile, follower count, stats and information you can provide, all these things will either increase or decrease the amount you can charge someone for a tweet. Some people can charge $2.00, others can demand $120+ per tweet!!
Sponsored Tweets was the first (though not the only one) of these networks I stumbled upon. They are transparent (nothing hidden) about the people writing tweets for you (as an advertiser), you are in control of the schedule, the text, you can block people who don’t perform. They provide you with metrics, and cost analysis, looking at things like CPC (Cost Per Click).
I would relate it to something like Google Adwords (PPC). You are essentially doing PPC with Twitter, instead of keywords displaying your URL, you find Twitter users with an audience who may be interested in your content. Not hard to draw the similarities there.
You cannot deny the power of a tweet any longer, one tweet from the right person can bring you thousands of targeted users. That’s power that never really existed before. Sure email marketing has been around and many other methods, but they all involvle sending out large numbers, twitter is 140 characters. 140 characters turns into 16,000 visitor, or maybe even 100,000 visitors. Now that is powerful!
Earning Money With Twitter
So how do you as a regular twitter user (non Advertiser), leverage this to make a few bucks? Here are 5 tips:
- If you have a new account don’t bother, it looks spammy. You may have set this up just to entice people to pay you to advertise. It’s suspicious looking.
- Provide a complete profile, would you pay money to advertise with someone you don’t know much about? Or how about someone who doesn’t take the time to disclose as much as they can about themselves.
- Try and find some stats on your previous posts and click counts. Have you been using something like www.bit.ly to shorten your URLS? I hope you have, because you can log in and view the amount of clicks on your shortened URLS (if you have a Bit.ly account), this is helpful in convincing someone your tweets are worth $$$
- Following to followers ratio. If you have 5k followers and you follow 5k people, I wouldn’t be interested. Anyone with a following count that high is simply using the ‘auto-follow’ tactic to inflate their follower count. Meaning they’re not truly interested followers, and it’s all automated in the game of gaining followers. In basic terms, higher the ratio the better, it means your followers are truly interested in you.
- Provide some Analytics in your Advertiser profile. Ironically the competition for Sponsored Tweets has a great tool to do this analytics.ad.ly. Allows you to see some metrics about your follower list, male, female, inactive, active, geographical location. All useful information to someone who wants to advertise.
Have you tried paid advertising with Twitter?
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Filed Under: Marketing • Social Media
That’s pretty cool, I suppose if have a decent following, posting for money every once in a while can’t hurt. I’d be careful about post too much, you’re following will disappear if they think it’s all spam.
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Kevin Reply:
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Absolutely, if I had someone and all I got were pitches for links, I’d remove them. Need to make sure if you are going to sell your tweets, you space them out with non-pitch tweets.
Same goes for Advertisers, make sure you’re picking from people who do more than simply advertise, and monitor the CTR on those tweets. Make sure they have an active audience.
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