I recently started a little experiment where I tested Twitter advertising to grow my Twitter following…
Most of my friends in the marketing world have pretty much given up on Twitter. I'm not quite sure why. I'm assuming that they've seen so much success with Facebook that they've put all their eggs in that basket.
However, Facebook as a marketing tool is getting more and more difficult… Don't get me wrong, Facebook is still an amazing traffic source and still accounts for MOST of our traffic over at Learn To Blog. It's still very lucrative and very effective. Having my eggs all in a single basket scares me a bit though. I don't mind playing in other people's sandboxes to help grow my business but I'm much more comfortable if I'm playing in multiple sandboxes, just in case one place decides to change the rules.
Lately, my experiments have taken me to Twitter…
I've been playing with Twitter automation tools, high engagement with followers on Twitter, ads that send traffic to my sites, and ads that grow my Twitter following…
Here's what I've found so far…
Twitter is now my #3 traffic source to Growth Hut…
Twitter is our #7 traffic source to Learn To Blog
(considering that 4 of the top 5 are all Facebook)…
My Twitter account has sent me 4 sales conversions…
Which is great when a sales conversion is worth $197 each…
You can see from that last screenshot that, in the month of December, I spent $422 to earn $788 in sales…
In a single month, with a few little experiments, I generated a new traffic stream, increased business revenue, and have been more engaged with my followers than I've ever felt before…
Now that you've seen the results, here's how I did it…
My first experiment was to purchase Twitter ads directly to our webinar registration page…
Here's the ad that I created to generate traffic to the registration page:
This ad generated 123 clicks on the ad, 18 webinar registrations, and exactly 0 sales from the webinar…
This specific campaign cost me $243 and about $1.98 per click to my site. I paid about $13.50 per opt-in to our list.
My second attempt was to send people directly to my 7 day blogging bootcamp page…
Here's that ad:
This ad was cool because I used a feature inside Twitter called “Lead Generation Cards”. Creating an ad with a “Lead Generation Card” made it so that someone simply had to click the “Yes – Register Now!” button and it would automatically opt them in using the email address that Twitter had on file…
Unfortunately, this campaign was not too profitable for me either…
This campaign generated 208 opt-ins for our bootcamp and resulted in 3 sales of our $5 trial…
The free bootcamp campaign costed me $229 and made about $15 in up-front sales… Of course, I will make a little more of that money back as people stick around with our program for longer…
The good news is that I got our cost per opt-in WAY down using Twitter lead cards. This time around, I paid about $1.10 per opt-in.
I was making some progress with these ads!
Another thing to keep in mind is that some of these leads that have been generated can still be sold to and some will convert in to more sales. There is still some hope for profits on this ad spend…
Here's where things started getting fun…
I decided to experiment with a multi-step process for marketing on Twitter…
The idea would be to pay to grow my following on Twitter, engage with that following by (shocker) actually being social, then occasionally put links back to my site in some of my tweets.
This was a scary step for me… With my previous ad experiments, I was able to generate pretty quick feedback with the results… I paid, people clicked, they either converted to a sale or they didn't… It was very quickly quantifiable.
I knew that paying to grow a following wouldn't work well if I immediately just started hammering them with offers.
I decided to make sure that my Twitter feed was a very valuable, content-packed, place. People needed to see value in following me…
Return on this cost wouldn't be instant but, hopefully, over the course of a month, I could look back and quantify the value of growing my following…
So I started a campaign specifically for Twitter growth…
And, this time, instead of using the Learn To Blog Twitter account, I used my personal Twitter account…
I'm a human and I wanted people to see that it was a real person behind the account and not some bots or a rarely updated and never-engaged account…
I created a series of tweets that would encourage people to follow me…
I then pruned the Tweets based on their success rate…
You'll notice that the top tweet had a follow rate of 1.39%… None of the other Tweets even came close to that kind of engagement so I scrapped them one at a time…
Now… There were some drawbacks to this and a lesson learned…
Narrowing this down to the one, most successful, tweet meant that all the people that I was targeting saw the same exact tweet over and over and over again until they either followed me or ignored my account.
Most people were excited and happy to follow me but I did get the occasional unhappy Twitter user tweeting at me…
And I got the people that were just plain jerks… Like I was intruding on their life or something.
The lesson learned here is that it's smarter to keep multiple tweets going so that people don't see the same one over and over again until they get frustrated…
Also, I learned that the “Mute” button is really handy for people just looking to be negative…
I take it all as feedback… Some people, like the first person, gave feedback in a way that I was cool with… The other two were just negative.
My following grew…
I added 879 new followers at a cost of $0.42 per follower.
Here is an actual growth chart of my followers from TwitterCounter.com (the last several lines are projections).
Staying engaged generates results!
While growing this Twitter following, I was sure to be constantly tweeting out high value content to keep people interested in seeing tweets from me…
Here's some tweets I sent (with analytics):
And then eventually I would promote something…
I used a tweet like that one on 3 different occasions in the month of December…
The net result was 4 sales in the month of December on a $197 course…
I paid $0.42 per follower to gain 879 new followers and made an addition $788 in the process. Not a bad result if you ask me…
The beauty of Twitter ads…
The thing that I love about Twitter ads that I can grow a following based on someone else's following. I can look at people who create similar content to the content I create and attempt to bring them over to follow me as well.
If, for example, I'm a fan of Pat Flynn and I want people who follow him to follow me, I can just set up my Twitter targeting to target fans of Pat Flynn…
I'm not going to list off all the people that I targeted to grow my following. If people try to target the same people I did, it will drive the cost up… I still intend to continue testing and growing… Some people that I did target that worked well for me included people like Tim Ferriss, Clay Collins, and Gary Vaynerchuk.
The best advice I can give when deciding who to target is to look at people who are active on Twitter and target their followers. You want to target people that have engaged followings so that you can grab those engaged people.
I tested targeting friends like Mike Filsaime and Josh Bartlett… However, they haven't been super active on Twitter in the past couple years… A lot of their followers aren't engaged anymore with Twitter so the results were low.
What are your thoughts?
Let me know in the comments what you think about Twitter and Twitter ads… Are you still using or have you given up on it?
Also, be sure to follow me on Twitter to continue to watch what I do… The best way to learn is to watch and model what others are doing.
More experiments to come!
