Twitter is testing a beta advertising program where they amplify your tweets. It’s $99 a month and you select the geography as well as some target categories. I’m still a fan of Twitter and I’m intrigued by this offering, so when I received the email asking me to join the beta I had to say yes.
I wanted to share some random thoughts so that I could return to this post and see what the impact was.
- According to Google Analytics, my traffic from Twitter has trickled to just over 100 visits per month. (It used to be thousands).
- I have 35,800 followers on Twitter and I’ve added as many as 150 followers in one month. I have over 500 mentions in a given month and about 8,000 profile visits.
So, with $99 spent, I would hope to get 1,000 visitors in the next month and a substantial increase in followers. We’ll see, though!
Why Would I Spend $99 to Amplify on Twitter?
There are quite a few reasons why I chose to do this test:
- I like Twitter. Every time I open Twitter, I’m met with new and interesting updates from people I’m not closely engaged with. On Facebook, it’s always the same people. I want Twitter to compete and survive. Seriously, if you haven’t opened the Twitter app in a while, just jump to the search/discover screen and you’ll always find something interesting.
- I’ve repeatedly said over the last few years that if Twitter charged for API access, they could immediately rid itself of poor quality bots and SPAM accounts. Perhaps this is the beginning of that. Imagine if only people that paid $99 a month could have their voices heard – I believe the conversation would be of instant quality.
A couple of concerns I have with this test:
- The number of categories to select was sparce. I could only select business and technology, there wasn’t any marketing option. That concerns me that my tweets that are amplified may not be relevant to those seeing the amplified tweets.
- I could only activate the beta on my personal Twitter account despite it being a business ad option. I wish Twitter would have let me open the account on @martech_zone or @dknewmedia, but they don’t have enough influence yet to have gotten selected.
I want Twitter to survive and I want to see competition to Facebook. If you believe this program is evil, it’s no less evil than Facebook encouraging all of us to build out our page communities, and now charging us to actually get a message in front of them.
Check back here each week and I’ll let you know how Twitter’s amplification is working.
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