Sponsored Hashtags & Promoted Tweets – Worth the Investment?

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With news that all users will see promoted tweets in their timelines by Q4, Twitter advertising strategies are getting hot. When Virgin America used hashtag #VXREDHOT to spread information and promote a contest, it saw its fifth highest day in sales, ever. Coke tested promoted tweets during the World Cup last year and recorded 86 million impressions and an engagement rate of 6 percent.

Here are three lessons learned from early adopters:

• Before You Buy, Anticipate Sentiment– when purchasing a hashtag to support a new product or service launch, it’s important to think through the role your promoted hashtag could play in aggregating negative feedback about your offering. Last week The New York Times promoted the hashtag #NYTimesNews and when the company announced its paywall, an overwhelming amount of negative tweets using the hashtag reverberated on Twitter – leaving the return on the NYT’s investment in question. Anticipating the sentiment from this announcement (who wants to pay for things these days, right?), the NYT might have been better served to invest elsewhere.
• Make Sure Context & Association Is Clear – to support the launch of Dell’s New Inspiron R laptop, which features lids you can change in seconds to personalize your computer, the company sponsored the #popclickswitch hashtag. However, if you track the hashtag, the majority of tweets are asking for clarification on what the promoted tag means or using it in a way that has no relevance to Dell – even with a promoted tweet from Dell that attempts to put the hashtag into context.  Dell may have had more success with a hashtag that included its branding.

 

• The Pitfalls of Buying a Promoted Tweet for an Existing Hashtag – at South by Southwest this year every panel had a hashtag assigned for attendees and those unable to attend to track the discussion. At the “Measuring Social Media – Let’s Get Serious” panel, the crowd fired up their Tweetdeck columns for the hashtag #SMAROI and were greeted with a promoted tweet at the top of their streams from a social media “guru” that linked to his blog content about social media measurement. While his intent was to generate awareness with this captive audience, it backfired as the audience viewed his tweet as clutter and spam. People were encouraged to not click-through to his content, questioning this consultant’s acumen.