Twitter has been hard at work recently in finding different ways of earning advertising money and the latest attempt comes in the form of Promoted Accounts. Already, the site offered visibility to brands through Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets, and now promoted accounts will help increase the visibility of the account itself, not just the content.
Two months ago Twitter turned on its ‘people recommendation engine’, a set of algorithms that enables the service to automatically suggest people you don’t currently follow but may find interesting. Now they have included the capability to suggest brand accounts. Screenshot below shows you Xbox verified account as an example. If you follow a bunch of Xbox-related accounts, and Microsoft is paying to promote their official Xbox account, it will be shown to you in the “Who to follow” area on Twitter’s right pane.
Twitter is also beginning to make Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends available beyond Twitter. They are testing syndication of Promoted Products with a select number of partners starting with HootSuite. These partners will run Promoted Tweets in search and highlight Promoted Trends, sharing in Twitter’s revenue for these products.
Twitter is enthusiastic about the success of its Promoted Products so far, noting that engagement rates — determined through a combination of clicks, replies and retweets — are around 5% on average.
The feature should help businesses attract more followers likely to be interested in their products and services, and thus gain greater visibility. However, the expectation is that the service will not be cheap. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, advertisers are spending “upwards of $100,000” on the Promoted Tweets.
And the ROI of Twitter’s Promoted Products isn’t clear yet. The very limited number of case studieswe see suggest that the investment will be worth it. Specific case studies reported by Mashable so far include Coca-Cola, which reported a 6% engagement rate for its campaign, Virgin America, which credits Promoted Tweets in part for its fifth highest sales day ever, and online trading firm Zecco, which said last month that engagement on its promoted tweets was 50% higher than its regular tweets, with “200 to 300% increases in some cases.” However, personally I am still skeptical about it and waiting to see more data.
What do you think?