Tweeter Tiptoes into Advertising - Opportunity for Businesses?

By announcing its advertising model called Promoted Tweets, Twitter officially moved to the paid advertising world. So have a look at its features, operation and benefits to corporations.

What is it?

Unlike traditional PPC advertising like Google AdWords, Twitter’s pricing strategy involves bidding on keywords based on one thousand views. This allows marketers to place their 140-character message at the top of the estimated 50 million tweets displayed on the website each day.

Promoted Tweets will allow advertisers to buy keywords to link to their ads, which will show up when users search for those keywords and later in users newsfeeds. Twitter promises they will be targeted for relevancy. The ads will also be monitored for resonance, which is determined by factors such as the number of retweets. replies, clicks on the links, etc. Promoted Tweets with low resonance will be dropped.

How does it work?

The ads will let businesses insert themselves into the stream of real-time conversation on Twitter to ensure their posts do not get buried in the flow. Starbucks, for instance, often publishes Twitter posts about its promotions, like free pastries. But the messages quickly get lost in the thousands of posts from users who happen to mention meeting at Starbucks.

The ads will also be a way for companies to enter the conversation when it turns negative. Several companies have created tools to measure sentiment on Twitter, but until now, businesses can do little with that information. Even if they write a post in response, it also quickly gets lost in a sea of complaints.

At first, companies will pay per thousand people who see promoted posts. Once Twitter figures out how people interact with the posts, it will figure out alternate ways to charge advertisers. In the next phase of Twitter’s revenue plan, it will show promoted posts in a user’s Twitter stream, even if a user did not perform a search and does not follow the advertiser. For example, if someone has been following people who write about travel, they could see a promoted post from Virgin America on holiday fare discounts.

How do companies approach the new model?

Corporate marketers can use promoted tweets to accomplish a variety of goals such as receiving customer input to streamline product improvement or to start a conversation which leads to greater brand recognition. It helps to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter. Since marketers do not pay for re-tweeted advertisements, this program gives marketers the potential to reach a large audience.

In order to tailor advertising to Twitter, marketers need to step up to the plate and take it upon themselves to create value-driven Twitter ads. Advertisers need to sit down and think about how content is used and shared on Twitter, and, importantly, what makes a Tweet (paid or not) successful.

However, let's see:

- The acceptance of Twitter’s users with the new ad program

- The balance between user experience and website benefit

- The effectiveness if the model in execution

(Sources: NYtimes, Twitter's Blog, Mashable, E-commerce Services Suite)

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Lipton Milk Tea: Chinese Viral Campaign

[Digital Buzz] This is a little old now, but a great view of what can happen when something goes viral in China! Earlier this year, the agency AKQA and Lipton Milk Tea created a viral campaign that was launched on China’s biggest IM and social networking site QQ to celebrate Chinese New Year 2010.

The campaign featured a website where people would select one of three videos (shot in first person) to personalise and send to a friend along with adding a special Chinese New Year greeting that was made of the steam from Lipton Milk Tea. The results were pretty crazy, with over 100 million people sending or watching a view in just a few weeks! Watch the campaign's summary below:

Challenge

Winter is a key season for sales of Lipton Milk Tea. Chinese New Year is also a heavy promotion period for the Lipton brand. The brief was all about communicating warmth during the festive season linking back to the milk tea product, and about allowing users to send Lipton Branded Chinese New Year Greetings to their friends.

Solution:

Lipton's agency created a viral tool that lived on QQ.com. QQ is China’s biggest IM and social platform. This tool was comprised of three short films in where users could simply upload a photo of their face, and instantly be part of any of the three films. They had the option to star in a schoolgirl dance, to perform in a rock band and to mime out greetings. In addition to this content, users could type in a customized Chinese New Year greeting to forward along with the film. When friends received this Lipton branded greeting, they saw a film shot in first person of somebody opening a door and receiving a box. The box contained a steaming hot cup of Milk Tea. When users blew into their built in microphone, the steam would then reveal the customized greeting. They then saw the film with the sender’s head in it.

Results:

This campaign has already received loads of free media exposure and proved that viral marketing, and a strong partner really deliver results. In a country with over a billion people, campaigns that reach the millions are not surprising. Lipton Milk Tea ‘A Cup of Greetings’ engaged over 100 Million users in less than two weeks since it’s launch proving that a simple Chinese New Year greeting, can truly go Viral.

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How to Generate Sales Lead by Google Adwords?

Millions of searches are happening each second. By taking advantage of search engines, companies can enhance their online advertising and sales performance. And Google Adwords offer companies this rare opportunity.

By using this, the company is generating and placing its adverts and paying Google for each click. It's a form of advertising that advertisers make a bid on selected keywords to have adverts showing on prominent position on Google’s search website result page, thus attracting more clicks from searchers. This bid can range from a few cents up to several dollars per click depending on market competition.

More important, as a pay-per-click form of advertising, Google Adwords could help to build qualified sales leads easier, more affordable, and more rapidly as it can also reach markets which were previously hard and expensive to access. However, in order to generate more sales lead, there are three keys for companies to apply in a Google Adwords campaign.

First, a keyword research to find targeted keyword phrases should be applied. It is fundamental to any Google Adwords campaign for identifying and selecting relevant and profitable keywords. Popular and obvious keyword may cost more, while keyword combinations or more specific keywords are better for the market niche. The priority is always targeted sales leads at the lowest possible cost, not just the increasing traffic.

Second, attractive advert copywriting and good landing page optimization is crucial. This will improve the conversion rates and minimize the cost per sales lead.

Last, cost per lead should be minimized. As in fact, most of sales leads are generated by a small percentage of keywords according to 80/20 rule. Therefore, elimination or lowering bid on unprofitable keywords is necessary. Adwords conversion tracking and Google Analytics are powerful tracking tools that help to select smart keyword and make clever bid strategy to minimize the cost per sales lead.

It is similar to other search engines like Yahoo! Search Marketing (Y!SM) and MSN AdCenter (known as Bing now), which offer the same principles and practices.

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