About a month ago I sat down to check analytics.twitter.com (if you don’t presently do this, I recommend you start). At the top of the Analytics dashboard was an advertisement for Promote Mode (Beta), Twitter’s new option for users wishing to expand their reach, and grow their audience.
Curious about how I might be able to achieve more with my Twitter presence, I clicked through and continued reading. For $99 each month I would be able to have my Tweets auto-promoted in the timelines of users who share my interests. Sounded like a pretty good deal, so I decided to buy-in for one month.
Well, a month has gone by; time for results!
First, a bit of organic data:
| Last Month | This Month | |
|---|---|---|
| Tweets | 467 | 655 |
| Tweet Impressions | 634k | 505k |
| Profile Visits | 5,229 | 5,277 |
| Mentions | 942 | 904 |
| New Followers | 70 | 146 |
You can see that I did much more Tweeting this month; this coincided with slightly more Profile Visits, and more than twice as many followers. That being said, I did see a noticeable drop in Tweet Impressions, as well as a small decline in Mentions.
In spite of the lower values here and there, 208% growth in Followers is great! How much of that growth is due to Promote Mode (Beta) doing its magic? Well, let’s take a look at some more data:
Daily Tweet Impressions
| Tweets | Organic | Promoted | |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 28 | 63 | 22,603 | 1,168 |
| March 1 | 29 | 17,236 | 1,259 |
| March 2 | 31 | 16,076 | 262 |
| March 3 | 107 | 26,153 | 1,459 |
| March 4 | 20 | 21,946 | 1,966 |
| March 5 | 6 | 8,311 | 1,062 |
| March 6 | 7 | 23,477 | 733 |
| March 7 | 3 | 6,065 | 826 |
| March 8 | 1 | 4,385 | 768 |
| March 9 | 7 | 15,310 | 372 |
| March 10 | 13 | 16,122 | 279 |
| March 11 | 19 | 20,083 | 2,534 |
| March 12 | 19 | 15,757 | 663 |
| March 13 | 130 | 51,985 | 899 |
| March 14 | 28 | 29,986 | 873 |
| March 15 | 67 | 56,170 | 729 |
| March 16 | 48 | 32,063 | 551 |
| March 17 | 11 | 14,890 | 782 |
| March 18 | 7 | 8,898 | 820 |
| March 19 | 26 | 17,320 | 1,751 |
| March 20 | 30 | 29,953 | 734 |
| March 21 | 11 | 14,688 | 349 |
| March 22 | 11 | 8,103 | 990 |
| March 23 | 16 | 11,359 | 668 |
| March 24 | 8 | 13,585 | 567 |
| March 25 | 0 | 2,910 | 55 |
| March 26 | 2 | 3,255 | 314 |
It’s worth noting I’m publishing this on March 26th, so that day’s tallies are not going to be 100% accurate. On average, Promote Mode (Beta) helped me reach 4% more views than I do organically.
But how does that translate into Followers? Can a 4% increase in reach produce a 208% increase in followers? Not in my case. Promote Mode yielded 7 followers.
In the last month, I’ve seen a total follower-increase of 141. Nearly all of that was organic, in spite of my Promote Mode (Beta) involvement. The rest of the numbers aren’t any more impressive:
So is Promote Mode (Beta) worth $99 a month? Not for me, but I can’t and won’t speak for others. Many of my Tweets are responses, and Promote Mode (Beta) explicitly warns that responses won’t be promoted. As such, to get the most out of the service you should be Tweeting (instead of replying).
Needless to say, I won’t be paying for another month.
I had sort of thought that is what would be expected by the service. I considered it, but I have also paid to have tweets promoted.
I found those promoted tweets to not be the best investment of my money. Hashtags and Buffer are a much better use of my resources. They increased exposure, but not response and conversion.