Psychology of Twitter Promotion Failure vs Follower Trust

bySwangirl

5.4K followers

Updated 6 years ago

I have been thinking about my failed paid promotion on Twitter last week. As some of you will recall I finally broke down and paid to promote a tweet which I have never done before. In fact I am very proud of the fact I had never paid for anything other than WA membership and my domain name all this time!

I finally tried the paid promotion in a last ditch attempt to get Black Friday sign-ups to WA. It was a total failure and despite tens of thousands of impressions (views) on Twitter I only got 20 some clicks through to WA! This is the same number of clicks through to WA as I get from a regular tweet or two without any promotion.

I guess I incorrectly assumed that the percentage of people clicking through to WA from the tweet would be similar on the promoted tweet as on a regular tweet. So, since Twitter told me the expected impressions on this promoted tweet would be about 50,000, I thought I would get a ton of clicks through to WA! If I got just one WA sign up for Black Friday, it would be totally worth the price.

I have been thinking about why the click through rate was so low. I suppose (this is obvious now!) promoted tweets may be automatically questioned and less likely to be trusted. I also realized today that the people seeing my promoted tweets don't know me, they are not my followers and have never heard of me before. They say it takes people 7 exposures to something to buy/agree to it. If this was the very first time these people heard of WA or saw one of my tweets about it, they would not be so likely to look into it as my followers who may be on their second, third or seventh view of my tweets about WA and starting their own website.

Also, my followers may be more inclined to click on a link I tweet because I am not always trying to sell them something. Most of my tweets are sharing cats and dogs at kill shelters who desperately need to be adopted or they will die. I don't get any money for these retweets, I just want to see the pets get rescued. Therefore, my followers may be more trusting of something I promote since my primary presence on Twitter is not to sell things. They know helping pets is my highest goal. I have lost many Twitter followers as many people don't want to see these pets everyday. I don't care. I will share with those who do care even though my following may not grow as quickly as others. So, the followers I have are a bit more selective I suppose as well.

So for all these reasons I think the Twitter promotion was a failure. I have learned some very valuable lessons though! So it wasn't a failure after all!

I just wanted to share these insights in case others are temped to do paid promotions on Twitter. I am not say it will not work for you, but these are the factors I believe made it a bad choice for me.

Thanks everyone,

Onward and upward!

Jessica