Twitter’s Promoted Tweets Program Shows Promise
By Anna Johnson on August 31st, 2010Twitter’s Promoted Tweets advertising program is showing promise with several companies saying they’ve run successful campaigns on the platform.
Since Twitter launched Promoted Tweets in April 2010, companies such as Virgin America and NBC Universal’s Bravo channel have reported success.
Virgin America used Promoted Tweets to promote its expansion into Toronto, offering 50 percent-off fares for the first 500 travelers to travel from California to Toronto. The promotion sold out in 3 hours.
Bravo used Promoted Tweets to highlight an Earth Day promotion and, within 2 hours, generated 300 retweets. It attracted an estimated 200,000 page impressions in the first day of the campaign.
These are ‘small wins’ for major brands such as Virgin America and NBC Universal. 500 tickets isn’t much for an airline the size of Virgin America and an extra 200,000 page impressions to Bravo’s site pales in comparison to its 1.4 million daily unique visitors (based on July 2010 data from Compete).
Perhaps the experience of discount online brokerage, Zecco, provides a more compelling indication of Promoted Tweets’ effectiveness.
Last month Zecco compared the effectiveness of 50 of its Promoted Tweets with that of its regular Tweets. On average, the Promoted Tweets received 50 percent more engagement (retweets, replies or clicked links) and, in some cases, received 200 to 300 percent greater engagement, than its regular Tweets.
Why did Promoted Tweets outperform Zecco’s Tweets to its own followers?
According to Zecco CEO Michael Raneri the key lies in Promoted Tweets containing popular keywords and content that is highly relevant to those keywords.
Sources: Paul Verna, “Can Twitter Turn a Revenue Trickle into a Stream?” eMarketer, August 26, 2010, Douglas Quenqua, “Promoted Tweets Increase Engagement by 50 Percent for Zecco,” ClickZ, August 26, 2010
