★ Advertising Over Twitter: The Results

A month ago, I announced that a partnership between me and Snobby Slice Web Design was going to happen for 2 weeks. Here are the terms of the advertising agreement:

• Four Tweets every day. 9AM, 12Noon, 3PM, 6PM.
• Four different advertisements a day all mentioning SnobbySlice.com and @snobbyslice.
• Contract Was for 2 Weeks
• Change my Twitter Background to a Snobby Slice Advertisement

When we first started, SnobbySlice.com has just launched and @SnobbySlice had zero Twitter followers. I started the program with only 2,332 followers on my account. At the time when I posted a link, it would average 55 clicks according to Bit.ly with a norma minimum of 30 clicks and a max of 100 clicks. Here are the findings of this project:

• @SnobbySlice’s Twitter account which was clearly commercial acquired 163 Followers
• Their Twitter account only tweeted 102 times in 2 weeks and most of there were conversation (@replies)
• Their website didn’t see thousands of clicks via Twitter, in fact most of their site traffic came from direct hits and Google Searches
• Their site reached #1 on Google for “Snobby Slice” and “SnobbySlice“
• This week, 5 days after I stopped the ads, they were recommended by Three different Twitter users for #followfriday
• I actually gained followers from 2,332 at the start of the project to 2,514 at the end of the 2 weeks. See that stats here.
• There was a clear drop in visitors to their site once the advertising partnership ended.

Here are some other notes:

• I had friends at Twitter that warned me that my acount may be suspended if I continue this advertising
• Prefacing my tweets with #advertisement reduced user complaints and increased clicks
• I warned my followers 4 times and via a blog entry that I would be doing advertising 2 weeks before the program started.
• I changed up the ads where the first week I had 4 unique text ads. 2 users complained about repetition and that I should change it up (not to stop the ads though) so I got @SnobbySlice to do 4 more text ads for me.
• In total, 4 complaints were logged regarding my advertisements. No one publicly said they would stop following me and all complaints were over DM (Direct Message)
• The advertisements were retweeted 4 times in the 2 weeks which I find very interesting.
• I received advertising inquiries from 5 other companies to do advertising (I declined).

Financially, Snobby Slice paid me $250 for a 2 week terms for advertising. At 4 Tweets per day, that equals $4.50 per tweet which is $4 less than sites like Magpie offers based on my follower count. I donated the proceeds to cancer research at the beginning of the project because this was not a financial money making scheme for me and I was merely doing this to see how the program went and what kind of user reaction would come from these kind of advertisements.

Despite being against Twitter’s TOS and grounds for an account suspension, companies should look at Twitter as a viable way to advertise their business. Snobby Slice took a chance and I’d call it a success for the money they spent. Here are some notes from my contact there:

• “We have been quiet about the site, so Twitter was really the only outlet advertising the site
• The clickthrough from Twitter was horrible. However, I lot of that traffic must have been direct as the graph shows. That means the people who saw the link on Twitter didn’t click on it, but remembered the brand in their head and typed it in their browser later. Better brand recognition, and they REMEMBER us! You can’t buy that anywhere else.
• We made good partnerships on Twitter with other users/content creators.
• Would do it again in a heartbeat.”

Thanks guys for taking a chance with this and thanks for my followers for being great guinea pigs for this experiment. You can follow me on Twitter as @adamjackson or @thebook.