In a world where you can reach millions of people with a few savvy clicks, social media advertising has taken the forefront in the online marketing realm and for good reason. While there are many online courses for running Facebook adverts, Youtube Adword campaigns and how to fully utilize Instagram influencers, Twitter seems to be swept under the rug and not seen as a viable platform for significant growth. Here’s why digital marketing specialists (and Lion Sourced) avoid paid Twitter advertising whenever possible:
Engagement Levels
When compared to other social media platforms, Twitter users tend to be significantly less engaged while scrolling through their feed. The average level of engagement for Twitter is 0.04, Facebook and Instagram smash this with 0.16% and 1.73% respectively. A possible explanation for this is that Twitter focuses more on text-based posts, with many successful advertising campaigns relying on strong imagery.
Cost and CPM
From attempting promote mode ourselves, and checking hundreds of reviews online, the levels of additional visibility your tweets will be receiving is overweighed greatly by the cost. Take the Buffer case study for example – For $99 (Which is a recurring cost that renews until it is cancelled), they received 24,000 impressions and just 12 new followers. When running an external Twitter campaign with a social agency, you could receive over 1 million impressions and a handful of extra followers, all for the same price per month.
Account Termination
It’s not uncommon for Facebook to limit your advertising account, but Twitter takes this to a whole new level. If your advertisement is show to someone who might not be interested in your product/service, they may choose to report your tweet as spam, which can lead to serious complications on your account. There’s been countless examples of advertisers being banned without being able to complete their campaign, with their appeals falling on deaf ears (Or in most cases, a robot) – This is the main reason we avoid paid promotion on Twitter altogether.
Support
We titled this section ‘Support’ but a more apt title would be ‘Lack Of Support’. After reporting a problem, you are almost guaranteed to receive an automated response from a system that really doesn’t understand the issue at hand. Twitter also have no contact number for their business users, which makes speaking to a human an almost impossible task. If you do manage to get through to a human-being (Which we did on our 7th attempt), you can expect short replies and little effort to rectify the problem.
To conclude, there are only two business models that should really be considering Twitter as a platform for their adverts. 1. Twitter only businesses. 2. Software or websites that are tailored to Twitter users, for example, offering tweet scheduling or enhanced support. If your business does not fall into the categories mentioned, we would recommend spending little, if any money on Twitter exclusive advertising.
