The Twitter advertising revolution is in top flight. Fresh off its Promoted Tweets revenue earning initiative, Twitter is appealing to consumers and advertisers once again with its new @earlybird feed. The @earlybird program allows participants to opt in to receiving coupons and marketing messages.
For advertisers and performance marketers, the data acquisition and display advertising implications of Twitter’s move into advertising are positive. The goal of any data acquisition team is to find a relevant target audience to effectively market client products and services. Engaging consumers through using a robust data acquisition service can be a highly effective method for building a customer database.
Here's how it works: Consumers sign up to receive exclusive offers and deals from advertisers. For a nominal fee, advertisers will tweet these offers to @earlybird followers. The key is making the consumer feel in control of the information he or she is seeking. By incorporating Promoted Tweets and/or @earlybird into a client data acquisition program, performance marketers will benefit from social media’s ability to influence buyer intent allowing users to proactively research companies before deciding to opt-in. With Twitter, the opt-in becomes the conversational tweet.
Like Promoted Tweets, @earlybird will work for data acquisition purposes for three reasons – it engages a relevant target audience, enhances brand awareness and increases buyer intent. It is also simple, fairly unobtrusive and expected to drive results.
Profitability wise, it's a win-win for both advertisers and Twitter. Well, for Twitter it's presumed to be a win. The Blue Bird is being tight-beaked about how much it stands to gain financially from the service. Considering Twitter wasn't earning anything before Promoted Tweets came along, even modest revenue streams would be considered quite a coup.
The benefits to data acquisition are fairly obvious, but that is not the only area poised to profit from Twitter. If strategically implemented, Twitter advertising can drive increases in display advertising revenue. Effective performance marketing relies on recognizing and utilizing trends. Twitter is all about trending, being of the 140 character moment. According to a recent Nielson social media study, social brand advocacy increases ad awareness and quadruples buyer intent. Where does Twitter advertising fit in?
Yahoo! Finance reported that twenty four hours after purchasing their Promoted Tweet, Coca-Cola drove 85 million ad impressions with an engagement rate more than 5.5% above normal levels. With that kind of increase in brand awareness, it is hard to imagine that @earlybird will not be able to, at least, duplicate the success of Promoted Tweets. Disney agrees, becoming the first @earlybird partner.
Enhanced profitability and improved audience targeting methods aside, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Twitter’s latest advertising announcement is the lack of a public uproar. If you recall, Twitter Nation alleged that Promoted Tweets would be intrusive to users ultimately ruining the social network. Such talk died down pretty quickly when folks realized they could actually profit from these tweets in the form of drastically slashed airline tickets or exclusive retail sales.
If marketers strategically implement Promoted Tweets and @earlybird into their data acquisition and display advertising platforms within client campaigns, they’ll be chirping with the little blue bird all the way to the bank.
Mitch Tuch is the leader and general manager of MediaWhiz's Data Acquisition team.
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