Performance of a Paid Tweet | Hacker News Reader

Performance of a Paid Tweet

swapped.cc

21 pointslatitude32 comments

Maybe that is because your promo site is just terrible. There is literally zero information on the landing page and then I have to keep clicking buttons to read some text in a 100x20px box at the bottom of the screen. Thats a pain.

Maybe all of that is because I was expecting an actual project, not some fancy graphics of something that launches soon (TM). I guess I just don't understand what your goal is with this - it seems like you are wasting the novelty of your project for some newsletter subscriptions.

Lovely feedback, thank you.

Sorry, I understand this comes off as harsh - but I think your time would be much better spent previewing the actual product.

Even if I did spend all the time to read the tiny text (which is a huuuge bet for users that click ads) I still wouldn't be much wiser to what your product can do for me.

Though the page might not be effective as a landing page, only 12 click throughs is still underwhelming for a promoted tweet. Now Notwerk has 12,000 new followers. So now I'm curious to see what would happen if the landing page was reworked and then they put out a few well timed normal tweets. I'd guess there'd be just about the same results but if it got more click throughs then maybe the lesson is that social media ads just take a little more time to work and do so in not so obvious ways. But it's just so hard to tell.

How much should one new user cost?

(As an anecdotal sidenote: my work's firewall blocked the bsa.ly domain on the basis of "adware".)

Not $100 :)

I've got a lot of subscribers through betali.st (can't recommend it enough) and it costs me exactly 0. Reddit promoted post generated some subscriptions, but these worked out to about $5 a piece. StumbleUpon cost was +inf, because not a single Speedy Gonzales of theirs managed to stay on the site for longer than 3 seconds, leave alone signing up.

I posted a bit more details on this earlier, have a look if curious - http://swapped.tumblr.com/post/22485539186/pre-launch-promot...

(edit) And, why is this at -1?

Average time for StumbleUpon visitors on one of my sites is 1.5 minutes, but others only get about 20 seconds of their attention.

I've found visitors from search engines tend to hang around longer, probably because they were actually looking for something. Stumblers and some other social networks are just looking for something to amuse themselves for a few minutes, so tend to be pretty quick to leave.

Interesting write-up though, and I look forward to seeing how other advertising methods perform.

Thanks for sharing the stats on your end. Advertising as a whole is a test and check game. You test different placements, find what works, and continue on that path. We have many advertisers very happy with their sponsored tweets through BSA.

If you're interested we could help make recommendations of accounts that may have a more relevant audience. Let me know if there is anything else we can help with. Send us an email at support@buysellads.com if you'd like to discuss further.

I was considering buying paid tweets through your service and ultimately decided against it. You shouldn't be forcing your own URL shortener on paid tweet placements. If I don't care for your click reporting, I should be able to opt out of it.

We can help with that. What benefit do you see to having t.co shorten your links instead of us? :) A redirect is a redirect, no?

t.co is Twitter's native shortener, so if anyone's parsing Twitter's data they will support it. Yours - not so much, e.g. see squarecat's comment on how your domain is blacklisted by his content filtering firewall.

we're not opposed to letting folks opt-out of our click tracking. i've added this idea to a bucket within the queue for new ideas.

Is there any reason why you went through BuySellAds instead of using Twitter's own promoted tweets platform? http://advertising.twitter.com/2012/02/twitter-advertising-f...

I'm not in any way saying that your $100 would have been better spent, but it seems like you would have a higher chance for success.

It's just an experiment, these aren't mutually exclusive. I will be trying promoted tweets further down the line.

Promoted Tweets are very different from Sponsored Tweets at BuySellAds.

It needs to be said front that this is NOT Twitter's ad product, it's some third party service (which likely just broadcasts to a large number of followers for $100).

So, there's no targeting, and the pricing appears high for Twitter's standards (which is priced in cost per engagement or CPE).

Please change the misleading title.

Twitter's ad product is called "Promoted tweets", and they are arguably far less precisely targeted than when tweeting to the followers of a specific account.

Getting 1 in 12 onto your mailing list isn't bad (of course, the cost is too high for those 12 clicks, but still). How is it targeted to followers? Do they put the tweet in front of people that would care about it?

This doesn't appear to be Twitter's ad product. It's someone (@NeowinFeed) posting an ad on their Twitter stream for pay, so no targeting - all @NeowinFeed's followers see it.

Yup, that's exactly it.

Your tweet didn't convey a compelling value proposition, so that may account more for why the response wasn't as great as you wished.

This doesn't show that all paid tweets aren't effective, just that your particular tweet campaign was not effective.

There are a lot of ways to take successful advertising channels and make them perform poorly.

It really looks like social media marketing is just a whole lot of hype. It's great for brand awareness but it's rare to see anyone report a boost in sales from it. I've been working in web development, focusing primarily on small to medium businesses looking for a web presence, and I haven't seen much success in attracting new business on Twitter or Facebook. You may get some followers or likes but they rarely, if ever, generate a single dollar.

People just don't care about you. They want to brag about their lives, create personal brands, and spam you. Let's take an example business: an infant care service that provides in home sleep training and help for new mothers who may or may not have post-partem depression. So the theory goes that such a business create social networking profiles, post cute baby pics, blog about their services (giving readers advice they can implement themselves), become an authority in their space, offer specials to followers and that will boost their reputation. From there you branch out and begin buying ads and promoted tweets and such to gain even more likes and followers and retweets. Well, it ends up being a waste of time. Assuming that the people who run these types of businesses have the time to do all this and/or the ability to work a computer which many just don't, the end result of all that effort is to turn those likes and follows into cash. But people don't care and even their followers simply ignore their tweets and posts in their stream.

I've done some testing and I've found that many businesses do get a good number of likes and follows but even when they do things right their tweeps and friends don't respond as the theory says they should. You know what they respond to? Stupid YouTube videos and cat pictures! On twitter and Facebook I got several of these businesses in a good position as far as followers and likes goes then did 4 weeks of experiments to see what people responded to. The first week I posted informational, authority/credibility building stuff as well as specials just for fans and followers. Then I alternated the second week cat pics and mostly things "normal" people would post. So for four weeks I alternated between a week of business related posts and a week of "normal" people stuff and the results were that for the weeks I'd post a link to an advice post in their blog or a fan-only discount each post would get 0 - 2 likes, comments, or click-troughs. For the other weeks they'd get between 15 and 40 likes, comments, retweets, or click-troughs.

So now I cringe whenever I hear about how businesses need to get in on the social media party. It's a big fat scam in my opinion. People ignore your grand opening, special event, discount, etc. but they sure love the random viral videos and cat pictures. Turning clicks into dollars works for only a very small portion of businesses online and that success is as much attributable to luck as it is industry, location, customer base, budget and size. This whole "every business needs go get in on the social media party" thing has got to stop. We all know that there's a lot of nuance to getting it right but the conventional wisdom, as it stands, is that all you need is a facebook and twitter account, some followers, and you'll make money. It's so wrong even for big companies as some have already found out.

To provide a counter point, Twitter generated me 50% of a $10,000/month revenue business. All I did was search for people discussing a topic, and answer their questions. Sometimes I'd plug the product, but most of the time I'd let them discover it naturally through our answers.

I tweeted about 1000 times a day.

But thats ~6 hours a day tweeting for $5,000.

$5,000 a month is great, but where is the growth in it? Plus it leaves you little time for much else.

There is little meat on the bone left over if you are paying someone to tweet for you.

That was very much part time, I could knock out 100 tweets in 10 minutes. I would block them in 4-5 periods a day. It's incredibly quick, easy work.

I'm assuming this is hyperbole, since that actually turns out to be like a question answered every 6 seconds -- but what kind of questions were you answering in volume like that? I'm curious because it seems to have had such a large impact on your bottom line.

People were discussing and asking questions about a book at a constant rate, and I would catch up every few hours. It's not hyperbole.

I totally believe you but I also have a feeling you're part of that very small minority who it works for. There are just some industries that lend themselves better to this kind of marketing than others. Ecommerce sites are in this category. Generally speaking, if you provide a service that cannot be done by web app then social media marketing doesn't work well. That's generally. Think of pool cleaners, housekeepers, gardeners, nannies, car washes versus any ecommerce product or services like web hosting, online insurance, travel bookings, etc.

The web is all about instant gratification. If what you're selling can't be delivered over broadband you're going to have a you time. You have to set up your product to be available as an impulse buy or your chances are slim. On the other hand, when people use search engines not only are they more likely to have intent but if they're specifically looking for your product or it's category they're more likely to be prepared for a non-instant buying experience. This is where those physical world service providers fare far better. My big complaint is that social media is billed by many as a panacea or a replacement for search traffic and unsuspecting small business owners waste lots of time,energy, and money on it with little to show for it in the end.

You're right. It was very specific.

Which is why Google is so powerful. People say "SEO is dead! You must diversify your traffic sources!"

This is all well and good, but when 90% of people look for solutions through Google, you're left out in the cold if you ignore them, can't rank high, or are penalized by them.

Sure you can get a ton of traffic if you're a site about funny memes, or viral videos, but everything else, search is the dominant marketing channels. And even if you do manage to get a ton of traffic through other means, those don't convert as well as someone searching directly for what you're offering.

Social media works for personalities, not businesses, as your own experience confirms.

So what would be the right approach in that case?

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