What is Twitter Promote Mode?

Twitter is ramping up their advertising for businesses, brands, and influencers alike. Their new automated advertising program, Twitter Promote Mode, takes your top 10 tweets of the day and automatically promotes them to users based on their interests or locations. Convenient, right? Definitely. The catch? Not a big one. Twitter Promote mode is a flat fee of $99/month.

Setting Up Twitter Promote Mode

1. Select Twitter Promote Mode from your profile settings bar.

2. Select country and time zone, currently Twitter Promote Mode is only available in the US, UK, and Japan.
3. Select Targeting based on interests OR location.

4. Enter payment info and start tweeting! You're able to check the status of your promotion anytime throughout the month by going back to Promote Mode from your profile settings.

Top Three Lessons Learned

Interests or Location?

With Twitter Promote Mode, you are only able to select interests OR locations. To see which worked better for us, we used interests for the first half of the month and location for the second half of the month.

First 15 days – Interests

The main pillars we specialize in are marketing, creative, and technology. However, marketing and creative weren't options to choose for interests so we selected business, careers, events, technology, and computing. We tailored our content to match these interests by focusing on technology and development best practices, careers we were hiring for, and events we attended or sponsored.

Second 15 days – Locations

For our location, we selected the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area since we’re located in Minneapolis. While this was ideal for sharing content going on in the Minneapolis area, we knew that our blogs and digital related tweets wouldn't drive as much engagement. For these two weeks we shared events we sponsored or attended in the metro area, different holidays that our audience could relate to, and primarily our work culture because who doesn't like puppies?

MEET MAY, OUR NEWEST TITAN PUP, SHE HELPS OUT TERRA WITH MANAGING THE OFFICE BY GREETING VISITORS WITH TAIL WAGS AND PUPPY KISSES. 10/10 WOULD BE GREETED BY MAY. #TITANPUPS PIC.TWITTER.COM/DKFTRNNMEF

Engagement wise, there wasn’t a notable difference between the two. However, we did notice that the profile visits were significantly higher when we were targeting interest based users instead of location based users. We believe this was due to two things:

1. Our key content is much heavier with blogs, best practices, and company updates rather than Minneapolis/St. Paul specific news. So even though we adjusted our posts to be more relatable to the Twin Cities audience, it's a lot more specific to people interested in our industry.

2. Our organic traffic at the beginning of May was much heavier which could have brought more organic users to our profile rather than promoted.

Photos and Polls

Tweets with images get 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets than those without so it wasn’t surprising that our photo posts received far more engagement than our text posts. In general, our posts with photos are more successful across all social platforms whether that's organic or advertised content. Our most successful photo tweet from the month received a 9% engagement rate.

THANKS TO THE @VERTEXINC TEAM FOR STOPPING BY OUR OFFICE TODAY FOR A LUNCH & LEARN TO TEACH US ABOUT THEIR SERVICES, NEXT TIME WE'RE TAKING A PICTURE WITH THE BAT POLE PIC.TWITTER.COM/VKXIBOXQ6Y

While we know how big of a role photos play in social posts, we didn't realize how effective our Twitter polls would be with engagement. Each poll we tweeted received around a 10% engagement which gave us great insight to our customers and people interested in our industry.

HOW WOULD YOU RATE YOUR COMPANY’S #ONBOARDING PROCESS?

Biggest Challenges

The biggest challenge we faced was attracting people who don't have an idea of who we are as a company or what we do. But isn’t that every marketer’s challenge? Our total profile visits for the month was double what we usually get which was interesting because despite having almost DOUBLE the number of profile visits, the number of followers we gained was the same as we get organically. But then again, how many times does it take you to follow an account once you see them in your newsfeed? Probably more than once (hello remarketing). Depending on how Twitter's algorithm is set up, the chances that we reached the same person with multiple posts is unlikely.

Another challenge we saw was that our top tweet of the month (see below) which had the most engagement and impressions did very poorly on promotion. We had a significant amount of organic impressions but only three promoted impressions. This tells us that high organic engagement doesn't affect promoted engagement which differs from a lot from Facebook's algorithm.

LAST DAY AT #SHOPIFYUNITE! WE'RE LEARNING ABOUT PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND BUILDING CLIENT TRUST HERE, GREAT CONVERSATIONS ALL AROUND. #SHOPIFYUNITE2018 PIC.TWITTER.COM/FFOVYZ7IY2

Overall

Since we do minimal advertising through Twitter, we enjoyed challenging ourselves with Twitter Promote Mode for thirty days. We affirmed that Twitter isn't the right platform for us to be doing paid advertising on because we are a B2B company and therefore should focus more on LinkedIn for social advertising. If Twitter is a valuable social platform for your business but you don't have the time or resources to advertise individual tweets, we found Twitter Promote Mode to be incredibly convenient. It helped increase brand awareness, automated advertising, and is a flat rate of $99 per month.

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