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Promoted tweets are… controversial. In last week’s poll, Raisin Bread readers were split roughly 50-50 on whether they work for marketing teams.
Do they work for individuals trying to boost their Twitter followings?
Relationship Hero founder and CEO Liron Shapira is finding out. He promotes tweets from his personal account that say things like…
- “Hey” (high performer!)
- “Hey Arnold was a solid show.”
- “By the time you click this tweet it'll already be deleted.”
We took a peek inside his experiment.
His core KPI
Shapira mainly tracks price per new follower, but also sees value in raw impressions.
His results to date
A few months into his experiment, Shapira is spending $50 per new follower.
His goal: to optimize his creative further and get that down to $10.
How he targets his Twitter campaigns
Shapira goes after “a lookalike audience of people that I like on Twitter” — people like Paul Graham, Robin Hanson and Pomp.
“I figure those will be quality followers,” he said — a.k.a. not crypto bots.
What he’s learned about promoted tweet creative
From testing various concepts, Shapira has learned…
- Images stop the scroll. “A picture of my Frenchie on his leash… was reasonably popular,” Shapira said.
- Unexpected creative grabs attention. Promoted tweets that don’t look like ads — with no branding or CTA — spark curiosity.
- Funny promoted tweets get an organic signal boost. There’s a Twitter account with 170K followers that highlights weird promoted tweets; Shapira’s have been featured multiple times, he said.
Why he’s still investing in promoted tweets
It’s more valuable to target future mutuals on Twitter, Shapira noted, than on other social platforms.
It’s a hub for important discourse: Why else would CEOs spend so much time there?
(Worth noting: Elon Musk has a verified Twitter, but no Instagram.)
What he’s testing next
Shapira has plans to try two new creative approaches…
- Uncanny targeting. Think ad creative aimed at only five people, that sparks a “How does he know?!” reaction.
- A cash giveaway. “The people that I try to target tend to not get that excited about five bucks,” Shapira said. But “I'm still optimistic that... I can deploy $10 per follower to create some value.”
Our takeaway?
To get the most out of promoted tweets, stand out from the crowd creatively, try Twitter’s lookalike audiences and test, test, test.