Twitter fails to live up to advertisers’ expectations
Much has been made of Twitter’s expanded ad offering, as they begin to introduce ads into users’ newstreams. It was an inevitable move for the site as they seek to monetise the increasing amount of content that’s shared on there. Twitter has had a chequered past with advertising however, as their offering has not been as open as Facebook’s, who provide an easily accessible platform for advertisers with budgets of any size. Quite why they haven’t got advertising right isn’t really clear, as there are some obvious tactics they can use such as maximising search results with an Adwords style platform. A recent report suggests that their advertising options may be in danger, as they invest more in monetisation.
Advertisers disappointed
Findings published in emarketer look at how Twitter is performing against advertiser’s expectations. While 31% of respondents rated Facebook’s advertising as excellent, this compares to just 11% for Twitter, even though it is the number 2 social network of choice for advertising :
What this suggests is that while there is a high level of interest in Twitter for advertising, the experience is not living up to expectations. Once the initial shine has worn off of using Twitter as an ad platform, the experience and results don’t seem to be leaving advertisers satisfied. While Twitter’s new products could change this, the results are concerning for Twitter and shows that despite investing time and money in ads, they’re still not working for the site.
The main worry here of course, is that Twitter begin to develop a bad reputation among advertisers, and experience poor performance in return business to the site. While at the moment Twitter advertising is still a novelty for the majority of brands, due to Twitter’s closed network of advertisers ( you have to be manually approved as an advertiser by a Twitter sales rep), this is yet to be proven as sustainable. Of course, what remains to be seen, is whether performance of ads in Twitter work to entirely different metrics than you experience in Facebook for example. While ads for Facebook Pages or sponsored stories are the best ad products in Facebook, there is an easy way to measure this performance, through increase in activity on your Facebook Page. With Twitter, ads don’t necessarily work by growing your followers, it is much more of a branding exercise. So advertisers may be disappointed that they don’t see an increase in numbers, but this could suggest that a different approach and understanding is needed for measuring ads on Twitter. They need to move quickly to prove the value in their offering, if their ad product is to succeed as they want it to.
