Blog and News | Twitter Marketing and Social Media Advertising

TweetROI unites influencers with marketers and protects the authentic personality that makes Twitter great. Twitterers recommend, in their own words, stuff they like. Marketers and PR professionals get valuable, previously unavailable Social Media exposure.

posted by brian on 2/15/2010 at 10:34 AM

Geotargeting with Paid / Sponsored Tweets

This is a very exciting new feature we added for 2010...

Is there any other paid tweet service that allows you to geotarget Twitterers?

Want to make sure you don't get tweets from Rumania? Or are you an Eastern European business that doesn't want tweets from Americans? You can select that now with geotargeting by time zones.

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posted by brian on 12/4/2009 at 4:08 PM

Advertising on Twitter for Results

I love this post: A scientific method to tame social media madness by Tamsen McMahon. It's one of the few social media posts I've seen, especially on a wide-distribution site, that talks about trying to get social media marketing results.

I recently finished a post on Search Engine People about the 5 Things I Hate About Social Media. I don't think it's live yet. But one of them is the low expectations people have for results. Evidently, expecting to get ROI from Social Media is like asking Forest Gump to learn Calculus.

I disagree. You shouldn't advertise or market without expecting results. And you should use platforms that help you get results.

That's what makes AdWords so powerful in the PPC world. You can track everything. Which keywords get you better ROI? Which ads? You can find out and do more of what works and less of what doesn't. The ultimate goal of TweetROI is to get to that same place... conversion tracking so that you can get more ROI, not just more clicks or impressions.

In the meantime, you need a twitter advertising system that controls Twitterer quality and stops spam, and that's where we've been focusing our efforts lately. The latest upgrades to our twitter advertising system include some of that. And more is coming.

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posted by brian on 12/2/2009 at 7:10 PM

Paid Tweeting System Improvements Now Are Live

Oh my gosh, guess what?

Featured New Campaigns For You To Tweet

Don't miss the new campaigns from Catalyst, the best known name in the trade show exhibition business. They're promoting the design blog (some cool stuff on there) and also a non-profit they sponsor. Check them out tweet a few.

The New and Improved TweetROI

We've just released the new improvements:

1. Our new paid tweeting disclosure system, which complies with the newest FTC guidelines.

2. Geotargeting by timezone. Advertisers can now restrict what timezones twitterers can come from. That also means a U.S. advertiser can prevent people overseas from tweeting their campaign, if they want.

3. More complete details about the flow of advertiser money. Previously, a lot of money could be tied up in unsent or unapproved tweets, and that was confusing. Now everything is more clearly accounted for.

4. Enhancements to approving and declining tweets.

5. Ability for advertisers to prevent tweet customization, if they so choose. These will be tagged with "AD", while tweets that twitterers can change will be tagged "SP".

6. A higher percentage of the ad spend will go to Twitterers now, as well! Just in time for the economic recovery ;-)

7. Discovering suspended users and refunding that tweet money to advertisers.

8. Minimal Twitterer quality. In the tweet approval area, we mark with red any Twitterers with ViralRank and ConversationRanks both at 1/10. Usually if someone has 1 in both of those, they're either a spammer, or too new to Twitter to have any influence. They should build relationships before they try to make money on Twitter! :-)

Coming Soon, More Improvements to Increase Spokesperson Quality

We're focused on ensuring that the quality of Twitterers in TweetROI stays high. No other pay-per-tweet service is as committed to preventing spam and maximizing the influence of the Twitterers who spread your messages. The User Ranks help quite a bit, but aren't sufficient to keep 100% of the riff-raff out.

Here are some coming improvements that will help advertisers get their messages out through only the best Twitterers:

* More info about the Twitterers you're moderating
* Click through to Twitterer profiles and hand-check their tweetstreams for quality
* Thumbs up or down specific Twitterers- over time advertiser community will rate each Twitterer

And there's a facelift coming. We don't feel the current look is as exciting as our tool is powerful. That's going to change.

We have some other exciting long-term improvements in mind, but don't want to tip our hand to the competition :-)

5 comments

posted by brian on 10/13/2009 at 3:40 PM

Don't Mind Us... Upgrading Our Sponsored Tweet System

We've been busy working on a major overhaul to TweetROI. The plan is for that to debut by Dec 1st. Patience... :-)

Here are some of the upgrades we've been working on:

1. Our new paid tweeting disclosure system, which complies with the newest FTC guidelines.

2. Geotargeting by timezone. Advertisers will be able to restrict what timezones twitterers can come from. That also means a U.S. advertiser can prevent people overseas from tweeting their campaign, if they want.

3. More complete details about the flow of advertiser money. Previously, a lot of money could be tied up in unsent or unapproved tweets, and that caused some questions. Now everything will be more clearly accounted for.

4. Enhancements to approving and declining tweets.

5. Ability for advertisers to prevent tweet customization, if they so choose.

6. A higher percentage of the ad spend will go to Twitterers now, as well! Just in time for the economic recovery ;-)

7. Discovering suspended users and refunding that tweet money to advertisers.

8. Minimal twitterer quality. We're considering making it a minimum that you have >1 ViralRank or ConversationRank. Usually if someone has 1 in both of those, they're either a spammer, or too new to Twitter to have any influence. They should build relationships before they try to make money on Twitter! :-)

1 comment

posted by brian on 8/31/2009 at 8:09 PM

TweetROI Story in U.S. News & World Report

Hey wow we were mentioned in U.S. News & World Report today. Check out the story on TweetROI and other twitter advertising platforms here.

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posted by brian on 8/20/2009 at 4:11 PM

First TweetROI Payments

First TweetROI payments to Twitterers went out this week, proving to many twitterers and their significant others that TweetROI is indeed for real.

:-)

4 comments

posted by brian on 8/14/2009 at 5:40 PM

UserRank, Followers, and Bidding Q&A

Q: Can you give me a little guidance on getting only the highest quality twitterer rank people to tweet? If we select 9, about what bid would make it interesting enough for them to tweet? Also, to be specific, can you give me a sense of the avg number of followers for a #9 and #10? I understand there are other factors that contribute to the rank, but this really helps me get a sense of the reach we may achieve (which helps me assign a value to the tweet bid). Thanks!

A: Great questions. I'll answer what I can here- but we need to analyze our own twitter network data more this weekend to answer part of it.

Our average twitterer has 2500 followers. However, the range is from about 100 to just above 90,000.

Our UserRanks are relative to the maximums- whoever has the most in a rank type automatically is a 10, and everyone else scales down from there.

Overall UserRank is more about number of followers and reach-- so here you'd expect Ashton Kutcher to be a 10. But on that scale, our best TweetROI twitterers are only 6-8. If you target an 8 right now in TweetROI, there might be only one twitterer. The one I'm thinking of says he'd tweet for $100. That means bidding $200 on your side.
ViralRank and ConversationRank are better measures of the twitterer's quality and effectiveness, in my opinion. If with all those followers, Ashton gets the most retweets and @replies, he's a 10... but one of our twitterers with just under 100,000 followers gets 75% as many retweets as @aplusk. So you can see that engagement, authority, and influence are not about # of followers- that's only one factor.

Our recommended bids in the Advanced Rank Bidding section are recent updates, so they're a good start.

Make sure that the tweet text you write is something a highly influential twitterer would want to tweet. Make sure your offering is interesting and above board... that increases the chance they'll tweet about it.

Thanks!
Brian

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posted by brian on 8/11/2009 at 11:26 PM

More than 2001 tweets sent through TweetROI

2001 tweets have been sent through @TweetROI since its launch July 6th, 2009. 500+ twitterers with total 1.5M follower reach.

2 comments

posted by brian on 8/3/2009 at 9:03 PM

Twitter Connection Outage FIXED

We got this diagnosed in less than 60 minutes :-)

Some tweets may still not have gone out if they got stuck in the middle of our outage- I wanted to make sure they didn't all go out at once and spam up anybody's Twitter account. So your tweets sent, expired, and other numbers may be off some until they go out.

We'd had an issue with unsent tweets, but that's fixed now too.

Let us know via the contact form if everything isn't back to perfect.

Thanks!
Brian

1 comment

posted by brian on 8/1/2009 at 6:15 PM

Marketers: Get Free Expert Feedback on Paid Tweet Campaign Creation

I haven't looked at every campaign every marketer has created thus far, but I have helped those who have contacted us through support. Marketers: contact us for help and for now, I can guarantee some personalized attention to help you get started with your best foot forward!

Here are some of the problems I see happening that could block your success in marketing with TweetROI:

Not using Advanced Rank Bidding: this is the heart of TweetROI, and enables you to pay more or less according to UserRank. The danger otherwise is paying too much to less influential twitterers, or too little to the very influential twitterers. The latter group will never tweet for you if you only volunteer to pay them a few dollars per tweet.

Upshot: Use Advanced Rank Bidding and you'll get more tweets and better ROI.

Bidding too low: as above, this can happen more easily if you only use the Standard Rank Bidding. But even with Advanced Rank Bidding, if you underbid, you won't get as many tweets, especially from the more influential twitterers.

Upshot: Bid according to the recommendations in Advanced Rank Bidding and you'll get better ROI.

Making the minimum rank too high: one marketer chose to only allow UserRanks above 8. I told the marketer I wasn't sure we had more than one twitterer that ranked that highly. The twitterers you think of as superstars have ranks between 6 and 8. There just aren't that many who are that influential on Twitter, let alone in TweetROI. My observation is that those with ConversationRank or ViralRank of 2 or above are quality twitterers, and those who have 3-5 UserRanks are very good. In fact, mine are between four and six, and I have 30,000+ followers that mostly like me.

Upshot: Don't make your minimum UserRank higher than 2 in most cases and you'll get quality tweets from more twitterers.

Putting the URL in the suggested tweet text: the webpage you want to send people to belongs in the "Link URL" field. If you put it in the suggested tweet text, it will reduce the space twitterers have to write in, and clicks on that URL won't be counted in your Marketer homepage. Soon the campaign creation form won't allow you to enter URLs in the suggested tweet text.

Upshot: Put the URL in the link URL field only and you'll benefit from accurate click stats.

85 comments

posted by brian on 7/29/2009 at 6:12 PM

TweetROI, TechCrunch, and Paid Tweet Disclosure

If you didn't see our mention in TechCrunch, read: "Full Disclosure: Sponsored Conversations on Twitter Raise Concerns, Prompt Standards" by Brian Solis.

Brian Solis started the conversation on his Facebook page, and major contributors included Stowe Boyd, Anders Abrahamsson, me, and Ted Murphy (of IZEA; our nemesis with the tongue!).

The conversation helped me decide how TweetROI should do disclosure going forward, and coincidentally, it dovetailed well with another need we've discovered...

TweetROI was originally created to be a recommendation engine- all tweets personalized in the words of the Twitterers that tweet them.

Surprisingly, not all twitterers feel like personalizing them. I realized that not everyone is a copywriter like me... if they agree with the sentiment the marketer writes, they'll just tweet it as-is. And some marketers would prefer to control their copywriting. These marketers and twitterers should be married.

What we've decided to do for these is:

In the Twitterers words: These will be tweets that ARE rewritten by Twitterers, and they will be tagged with SP.
In the Marketer's words: These tweets are as-written by the Marketers, and are tagged AD or PR, depending on whether they are direct marketing or public relations campaigns.

Still thinking about whether PR tweets need both SP/PR. Probably. Takes away some of the elegance of the solution, but I really doubt PR people would appreciate sending out tweets with the word AD attached.

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posted by brian on 7/23/2009 at 10:52 AM

TweetROI on InternetNews.com

Marketing Startups Get Serious About Twitter

A diverse set of companies pile on to leverage the fast-growing microblogging service.

July 23, 2009

By David Needle:

Tweet your way to riches? That's probably not in most people's future, but a number of companies in the fast-growing Twitterverse are focused on helping users and companies leverage the popular microblogging service for financial or marketing success.

For starters, there's TweetROI, a service that pays influential Twitterers for spreading the good word about marketers' products and services. In keeping with the social media theme, the last bit of the company's name actually stands for "Return on Influence," not "Investment".

"There are a bunch of companies -- small, medium and large -- going on Twitter and hoping they can figure out some kind of ROI; we call it Return on Influence," Brian Carter, co-founder of SocialROI, the company behind TweetROI, told InternetNews.com.

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posted by brian on 7/22/2009 at 8:35 PM

The Best Way to Disclose Paid Tweets

This last week has been all about discussions with some of the best and brightest in Social Media about how Paid Tweets should be disclosed.

We discussed this:

On Brian Solis's Facebook Wall (extensively! And I've urged him to publish it for you because you can only see it if you're his friend. Maybe should friend him): That discussion included Ted Murphy of IZEA who's confronting the same issue for his "Sponsored Tweets" service
On Stowe Boyd's Microsyntax blog
Chris Brogan and I emailed and DM'd about it

The upshot is that we all believe all paid tweets should be disclosed, and we decided that SP and AD were the best, and no hashtag. Consult those discussions for the details, and there are many.

The way we're going to use it is this:

SP means sponsored, and covers any paid tweet that has been customized in the Twitterer's own words.
AD means sponsored and NOT customized. It is as the Marketer wrote it.

Messages that are not paid - i.e. non-profit messages with no paymentthat Twitterers send out of the goodness of their own hearts - will have neither designation. In this case, TweetROI is simply a messaging platform, not Pay-Per-Tweet.

Still debating whether AD/SP has to go at the beginning of a tweet.

And once we decide that, it will go into the development queue for the brilliant Mr. Kevin McCallum.

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posted by brian on 7/19/2009 at 2:19 PM

How TweetROI Fights Twitter Spam and Increases Marketing ROI

The other guys at TweetROI think I'm a bit too obsessed with quality.

Yep.

Although we want to increase the size of our Twitterer network, I knew one of my top priorities after launching TweetROI would be to make sure spammers didn't devalue the service.

So I've been watching EVERY tweet that goes through TweetROI, looking at EVERY twitterer and their profile and their tweets. I've learned a few things about Twitter spammers, and I've discovered how our UserRank system makes it easier to identify them.

However! One man's spam is another man's money-making tactic. I'm not sure everyone will agree that some of the profiles I'm talking about are spam.

Here's my definition of a spammy Twitter profile:

High TalkRank (4-7), low ViralRank (<2) and low ConversationRank (<2).

That's a profile with lots of updates but nobody replying to it and nobody retweeting it. It might have thousands of followers, but those followers are either other spam profiles or people who just ignore that tweeter completely. Nobody cares. There are no relationships.

Some of you are probably saying, "But Brian, what if people love the links I send out? You can't tell if they click on those!" That's true. But if they liked your links, they would @reply to thank you for them. You're not getting replies, so no one cares.

No replies and no retweets = no relationships = no twitter profile value. Sorry Charlie.

So How Do We Help You Fight Spammers?

If you use Advanced Rank Bidding, you can turn off lower ranks, or bid much lower for them.
We're also going to introduce an improvement into the tweet review process for marketers. You'll be able to see the UserRanks of each twitterer who tweets. You can reject on that basis, if you like.

Marketers, Twitterers, and Followers Win

The upshot is that your ROI as a marketer improves, and spammers make less money or can't even see your campaigns, which discourages them from trying to waste your ad spend.

Also, this encourages Twitterers to improve their level of influence. If you want to make more money tweeting, you need to think about how people react to you and why. Or if they don't respond, what can you do better?

And perhaps most importantly, followers see less spam. Twitter stays more pure, constructive, and useful.

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posted by brian on 7/15/2009 at 10:00 PM

Narrated Introduction to TweetROI

Just released an introduction to TweetROI, narrated by yours truly, Brian Carter. Enjoy!

1 comment

posted by brian on 7/10/2009 at 1:05 PM

Notes on the First Four Days of TweetROI

Well obviously, we're very excited :-) We've launched!!!

We got some Twitter buzz... 250 tweets in 4 days
200+ sites wrote about us, 236 websites linked to us
100+ Tweeters signed up in the first couple days
25 marketers signed up
213 tweets have been sent through TweetROI
One of our marketers turned a profit within his first 6 tweets!!!!!!!!!

OK, yeah, that was too many exclamation points.

Sorry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also, there were some bugs. Booooo!!!

But we fixed most of them. Yayyyyy!!!

There are still some left. Boooo.

But we have some big news I can't tell you yet that's bigger than all of this... Yayy!!!!

For now, keep tweeting, keep giving us feedback, tweet on!

- Brian

3 comments

posted by brian on 6/28/2009 at 3:16 PM

New Video for Twitterers about TweetROI

This video goes into more detail for Twitterers about the benefits of TweetROI and how it works.

If you watch this before TweetROI launches, go here to sign up to get notified about launch!

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posted by brian on 6/27/2009 at 12:29 PM

Quick Exciting TweetROI Overview Video

Ahhh, I'm so excited about this hyped up new video about TweetROI. You have to see it to believe it! :-)

If you watch this before TweetROI launches, go here to sign up to get notified about launch!

1 comment

posted by brian on 5/15/2009 at 6:05 PM

We Hate Advertising

WE HATE ADVERTISING

Ok, we don't really. Brian has a strong background in advertising. But we hate advertising on Twitter.

You might be thinking, "Guys! Isn't TweetROI all about advertising?"

No, TweetROI is not advertising. We purposely designed tweetROI to give power to Twitterers so that they controlled what messages go into their tweetstream, and to personalize those messages. We don't want twitterers to simply pass on messages written by marketing professionals. We want to preserve the authenticity and personality that makes Twitter great.

TweetROI is marketing, not advertising. It's a recommendation engine that fits the personal, authentic ethos of Twitter. Previous pay-per-tweet services like magpie are advertising. TweetROI is not.

With services like magpie, you gave up control of your tweetstream over to messages written by advertisers. With TweetROI, you take what a marketer is saying (suggested tweet text), check out their link if they have one, and write your own message. That's "influential recommending", or perhaps "distributed spokespersoning" - not advertising.

Advertising is technically a subset of marketing, and there are many more types of marketing and communications that TweetROI fits:

Branding
Public Relations
Company spokespersoning

TweetROI, PR, and Brand Reputation

If a company uses TweetROI to combat a negative image in the marketplace, is that advertising? It could be part of a public relations effort to improve their image. This PR could be accomplished through online press releases, traditional PR contacts, and TweetROI. That's not advertising, is it? Nope, it's PR.

TweetROI is a communications tool that allows companies and individuals to leverage the power of influential Twitterers to share messages and links. It goes further than advertising. Thank God.

NOTE: the current TweetROI beta is private. To get notified when TweetROI opens up wider, sign up here!

1 comment

posted by kevin on 5/11/2009 at 11:26 PM

Welcome to the Beta

Welcome! We're really excited to be launching the Usability Beta Test and thank you for taking part in it. We'll be posting a lot more content here and on the live site's blog as the days progress. In the interim, if you have any questions or feedback, please be sure to use the Contact Form. If you need to send an attachment, please feel free to email us at support@tweetroi.com. We'll try to respond right away.

Kevin and Brian

1 comment