Twitter invited us to try out their new autopilot advertising subscription model, and we went straight to try it out. Before we go deeper and focus on the details and results of this service, I just want to reemphasize that numbers aren’t everything in social media and that you can’t always measure the success of campaigns only with those few numbers that you get out of a campaign report.
The Twitter Promote Mode is still in beta, but a few accounts have been asked if they wanted to give it a go along with a tiny bit of explanation but no real commitment on the potential outcome of the service. Unlike other advertising campaigns on Twitter, which you need to set up and manage yourself, Twitter Promote Mode is said to be a subscription-based autopilot with a flat fee.
They ask you to enter your credit card details, and before anything happens, they will grab $99 from you. This is the charge for one month of service which will auto-renew unless you cancel the subscription in time. If you happen to cancel it, they will continue to deliver the service until your service period ends, so it does not stop your service immediately, and you get what you paid for. Right now, if you leave the beta test, you will not be able to return to the service until it goes into production, if it goes into production at all, that is.
Results
TechAcute usually does no paid advertising on social networks such as Twitter. We try very hard to build a good relationship with our community and ideally, our number of followers grows, but it’s much more about the people than just another +1 in the book.
We hoped for the Twitter Promote Mode to be a success and help us to reach more people with the help of their autopilot that shoots out AI-selected tweets towards an AI-selected audience of users.
We are in the middle of the first month now, and last night we canceled the service. The results of the service were a lot less than anticipated and nowhere near what would be reasonable for $99 per month, even if you take into consideration that you don’t have to do anything for the service to keep on running.
Now for what you wanted to read, the facts and numbers relating to the Twitter Promote Mode. The following figures are the sum of 13 service days, as they took a day of the two weeks to verify the content quality and set us up.
People reached
Thanks to the Twitter Promote Mode for $99 per month, we have reached 5% more people than we usually do.
Followers gained
The advertised tweets led to an average of one additional follower per day with a sum of 16 new followers in two weeks into service. Please be aware that these followers are free to unfollow you at any moment in the future if they no longer like what you’re doing. That would not be unusual behavior for users that follow your account based on an promoted tweet.
Profile visits
There was apparently no change as far as users visiting our Twitter profile goes.
Tweets promoted
On average the Twitter Promote Mode autopilot advertised ten tweets from the TechAcute Twitter account per day. Altogether they promoted a total of 123 tweets in nearly two weeks.
Summary
Even if you configure your autopilot campaign with one or more target groups, that you want to reach, in particular, the results of this service are poor, taking into account what it costs. Most certainly, I am not perfect and might have missed out one or two tweaks, but for a service that is advertised with terms such as “autopilot”, I don’t expect the users taking marketing classes before starting their gig.
If they invited brands to try this service for free, I wouldn’t complain, but for the monthly cost of $99, you can get a lot more than a bit of reach and a hand full of new followers. I understand the meaning of a beta phase but if I’m paying in full I expect the full service. Even if you did set up a poorly configured advertising campaign on Twitter manually with the aim of getting new followers, you could undoubtedly get 99 new followers for those $99 or more. I have no reason to believe that the results of this service would improve over time either, so we canceled it.
If you genuinely want to improve your impact on social media, it would be wise to invest in a skilled person to support you in developing and growing the community. Alternatively, you can spend some of your own time, exchange thoughts with others and get to know people. This lesson cost me almost a hundred bucks, but I hope it saved the budget for some of you who read this. What do you think?
Photo credit: J.Barande (École polytechnique)
