Advertising on Twitter: choose the right kind
Do you use Twitter for promoting your discounted or free books? Can you tell if advertising on Twitter brings any real result?
These days there are dozens of Twitter promoters. They promise you amazing results and the possibility to reach hundreds of thousands people - or not?
You see, I'm a very impatient person, I want to know the result of something I'm going to do even before I do it. Especially, if I have to pay for it. This is why when it came to ebook promotion for my novel, I paid a lot of attention to what exactly every single promo would bring me. When I found out about Twitter promotion opportunities, they amazed me at first - Wow, 150K audience! - I thought, and I'm sure, some of you were the same at some point. How many of these people will see the tweets that will be sent out for me? - I wondered. I used a couple of those promotions with no result. What I needed were their stats, but I couldn't see them. So I ran an experiment.
I sent out a couple of tweets with the link to my book and mentioned a few promo accounts that offer free retweets, different in each tweet. All those accounts had at least 20K followers, and together they had 150K followers. They all retweeted me as I asked, so you'd think I'd get at least some results from it (meaning sales) - but no, not a single one that day. The next question was - how many people actually saw my tweets and how many of them clicked the Amazon link?
Of course, not all 150K people visit Twitter every day and read all tweets. But at least 5% do, right? That would be 7500. It's all hypothetically, of course. Even a half of those would be 3750.
But my tweets only made 400 impressions each in 2 days. 1 link click. 1.
Now I had 2 questions: why so few and who were those users? So I went to a random Twitter promotion account with 50K followers and looked at them. I scrolled past a few hundred users. 80% of those were authors, 10% readers, 10% empty accounts. And this was actually the best part, because what I saw next were usual bots.
I've worked for 5 years at a big social website tech support, I know a pattern when I see one. Programmed logins, stolen pictures, bio's, a man named Rachel, and no tweets. These are bought followers that you get if you pay some of those people promising you a quick way to get 20K followers. The second question was answered, too, - those 400 impressions were authors' accounts. Of course, there were no clicks, they're not my target audience, they're busy promoting their own books.
But there was still one question left - what about the others? Maybe some of them have real audience? Because I did have great results with a couple of them, especially, non-spammy ones that only send out 5-10 tweets per day. I already knew that they can bring small stable sales, but any big boost - not so much. At least, not for me.
I got another proof the next day, when the biggest Twitter promoter sent me a link to their "proof" page. (No names needed) According to their own information, with the audience of 600K followers, the books they promoted for 5 days got about 1000 link clicks. Only 1/600 of their audience! Do you still question who those 1000 people were?) And how many of them actually downloaded the book?
So, for about $50 you'll get 300, maybe 400 downloads. In the best case scenario, because some of those books only had 500 link clicks. I had the same results per day without any paid promos.
Is it so surprising considering that those Twitter promotions consist of attacking Twitter with 80 tweets for each one of your books per day? Or do you still believe that real people will read all this spam instead of simply checking the Amazon TOP100 list or subscribing to Bookbub?
Basically, all I'm saying is do check the quality of those promotions: how many of their tweets get retweeted, who are their followers, what other authors say about them (ask your friends about what they use, because it's almost impossible to find any specific information like that on the Internet, and this is one of the reasons why I post about it). And don't expect any huge results from Twitter, a few hundreds of free downloads top, you can get the same result with a $5-10 newsletter promo. Try some monthly plan to get stable sales, because this does work, and with me it paid off in 2 days. I use Indie Book Promo, they have a great gig on Fiverr, and so far I couldn't find another one like that.
I do use Twitter myself, too, but not for spamming people with my book. As a result, even from a few hundreds of followers I get more impressions, retweets, and link clicks than from those "thousands". And from what I see, they actually read my book reviews and visit my blog when I have some news. If you haven't used Twitter yet, you may think it's easy to get people to engage with your tweets, but it's really a pretty subtle job that won't bring any result if you don't pay attention to your stats and content quality. I will write a detailed post about it later (together with all the tools that I recommend for fast and efficient Twitter management), subscribe if you would like to get a notification when it comes out.
If you have a different opinion about advertising on Twitter, please, contact me via the email below. I'm interested in the topic, and if you have some good info about it, I'd love to share it with the others as a guest post.
