Twitter is expanding its range of options to business users.
Walt Disney has already signed up to @earlybird allowing their users to access deals and discounts for a limited period of time eg: two tickets for the price of one via Twitter for the launch of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Through this paid scheme, the company will have it’s posts retweeted regularly via the earlybird feed which already has over 50 000 followers. Users will follow a link in the tweets to be directed to their Fandango site and then they’ll use a special code to access the offer.
All @earlybird offers have to be unique and exclusive to Twitter. Disney’s Pixar studio has also previously paid for Toy Story 3 to feature as a trending topic on Twitter’s homepage.
Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo, said that they intend to build advertising models that reflect existing habits among users. “We’re trying to make sure our ad platform is organic to how people are already using Twitter,” he said. “There’s going to be lots of testing. So far it’s working.”
The Old Spice campaign “The Man your Man could smell like” has recently been run as a promoted trend by Procter & Gamble and has achieved considerable viral traction across the web.
Bravo, Red Bull and Virgin America have also joined the Promoted Tweet scheme and have reported promising results although Costelo suggests that it has helped that many of these businesses had already established a presence on Twitter prior to using promoted tweets so they have interacted with consumers rather than simply using search ads from Google. “If we tried to monetize at day one, you’d see people cutting and pasting their Adwords ads and getting no followers,” he said.
Coca-Cola, the soft drinks giant, generated impressive figures from employing Promoted Tweets and Topics during the World Cup, when it sponsored the conversation surrounding a match between England and the US and they claim this approach earned them 86 million impressions in 24 hours and delivered an “engagement rate” of 6%. A rate considered to be rather good against the average 1% on generic online advertising. “The amount of impressions in such a short period of time around our whole World Cup campaign, to me it was a phenomenal time,” said Kruse. “It made this emotional connection at the time, it was great.”
Data sourced from AdWeek/Financial Times;
