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Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly? It's because their ads are trash. I know lots of marketing people and they all stay away from using them.

Say what you will about Facebook and Instagram, their ads are better overall. There's been several times an Instagram ad showed up in my feed, and I said shut up and take my money.

Nothing like that has ever happened on Twitter for me.

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As an advertiser yes. This is definitely part of the answer.

Google Ads is an amazing piece of tech with usually great ROI but requires lots of setup. Facebook is easy to use, worse in terms of ROI but it has the amazing feature of optimizing for spending 100% of your budget all the time.

Twitter and LinkedIn don't do either.

Weird. All the B2B services I've bought in the last year are because of advertising were based on LinkedIn ads

I've been thinking about this because it's true from my observation, and I wonder what's the main reason:

- Is it because they are "not evil enough" compared to FB in tracking people?

- Is it because they can't track people in the same way (FB pixel is _everywhere_ on the net, Twitter's code is also widespread but probably less?)

- Is it because publisher tools are not as good as FB's? (in FB from what I know you can target various demographics really well with campaigns, based on criteria such as location, age, interests, approximated wealth etc)

Twitter is not set up to know things about people in the first place. Your profile doesn't contain any personal information. Most of the interaction on Twitter is between users, while on FB it can be both users and companies with either ads or corporate posts making it into the feed. You click a post from a clothing company, Facebook will show you a relevant ad a week later. On Twitter on the other hand seems like companies never really bother advertising.

Facebook tracks you almost obsessively all over the web, and on its own website (with many features designed specifically to get more info about you).

Twitter does neither.

Which is great for the users, but probably horrible for the advertisers.

Another big part of it for me is that they make their ads appear almost like tweets so now when I scroll, my brain has learned to tune them out as useless filler. I don't think making them easier to distinguish would be better because I would tune them out even faster but they need to change how they display ads to actually make them effective.

Very effective for free influencer marketing or crypto scamming though

this. if a Google/IG ads team was put on Twitter ads, their revenue and user satisfaction would likely go through the roof

when they (and other platforms) started having sponsored posts that, themselves, have a pre-roll ad that plays before the user is granted the privilege of viewing them, it reeked of desperation. years later now this is the norm—crazy.

We did that once, it was a kids pool.. we thought it would be great for our large dog to lounge in during the summer. When we got it though, it was literally about 9 inches in diameter. It was a like a pool for GI Joe dolls.

At least for B2B, LinkedIn (and paid search) is mostly where it's at.

This. Twitter ads are horrible.

I never ever get an actually good ad on Twitter.

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