Early Promoted Tweets adopters report encouraging results
When Twitter launched its much hyped advertising program, Promoted Tweets, quite a few big brands signed up and started using the service. Twitter advertising is somewhat similar to Google’s offering of paid search listings in what the way it works is concerned and in less than a month, early adopting companies are reporting quite encouraging results.
No matter what you track – speed of sales, clicks, page impressions, this baby advertising project seems to be paying off fast. Virgin America, Red Bull, NBC Universal and many other brands have taken the stage to explain what campaigns they have run and how they had a positive outcome.
Virgin started with a 50% discount on a limited number of plane tickets from California to Toronto. The Twitter hype helped them see the 500 tickets in about three hours. Virgin America’s VP of marketing, Porter Gale, also stated that the day when they launched their Promoted Tweets campaigns, the overall daily sales were the fifth best in the company’s history. And if that’s not enough, adopting the new advertising service had generated 10 million dollars in free press coverage, plus an increased number of followers going from 64,000 to 76,000.
NBC Universal used Promoted Tweets to advertise Bravo’s Earth Week event through an online game determining consumers’ green IQ. The initial promoted post reached the maximum retweet limit (300) in less than three hours (there’s something magical about this 3 number, isn’t it?) and subsequently generated 200,000 impressions in only one day.
These are big companies with quite some followers and that combine paid tweets with a strategy to engage followers and quite some efforts to generate trending topics on the microblogging platform. Just saying their name and stating they’ve adopted Twitter’s service is enough to catch the eye of the press.
These results and the accuracy of campaign tracking should be taken with a grain of salt. Usually they are part of a complex strategy, involving a good presence on Twitter, a big number of followers and a big enough percentage of active ones to help them promote stories and an already existing interest from the media.
What I am curious to see is how Promoted Tweets work for SMBs. Is anyone reporting such positive results only one month in? I’d like to read a few such stories but haven’t seen any yet. Have you?
