How To Pick The Right Person For Your Sponsored Tweet

I recently had a client that wanted to venture into testing Sponsored Tweets (with a little nudging on our side). Now I can't go into specifics of the test, but I wanted to at least share some of the struggles and insight that I obtained going through the process of setting up the test account. For this test we choose to use the company, Sponsored Tweets.

The first obstacle (and it was a high one) was how do I choose which person to solicit based on my budget as well as my product? Well Sponsored Tweets provides the advertiser a couple of data points to filter their pool of candidates. One metric you can filter by is based off of Grader.com's TwitterGrader score. The score is betwen 0 and 100 (100 being most influential). They also provide a filter based on Klout.net's Klout Score. The score is between 0 and 100 (100 having the most clout). You can also filter by max cost per tweet, minimum number of followers, by the person's follower ratio (Followers to Following - typically want this number to be under 1), keyword tags, and by geographic location.

Once your results are filtered, you are presented with a list of matching candidates. On this results page Sponsored Tweets provides another metric to sort by called FAR (Follower Activation Rate).

"...measure of the Tweeters influence with their followers based on percentage of people who click through. The scale is 0-10, with 5 being the system wide average. The higher the number the better."

I took a look at several of these accounts with high FAR score and found that it did not correlate to the scale provided. I found a lot of candidates with a 6 were not very engaging. Again I found these accounts to contain mostly ReTweets. This could of been due to seeing a snap shot of the last 24 hours of their account.

So we started looking at a max cost per tweet of $2. What we found is that 99% of these accounts were non-engaging (some RT, but no conversations). These accounts also tended to be set up through a RSS feed in a "set it and forget" mode. Probably until we reached the $10-$30 range did we start to see better engagement within the candidate accounts.

So here are some important tips that we used to decide if we wanted to offer our ad to a particular person.

1. Take a look at the candidate's Twitter stream. Take note how ofter they are responding, versus just posting and ReTweeting. You do not want a wall flower.
2. If they are using Bit.ly links in their posts (not ReTweets). Take the Bit.ly URL and add the plus sign (+) to the end of it in a browser. This will show you the click stats on the link. This is a great measure of engagement. What we found in the range of $2-$30 was typically 15 clicks per link.
3. People can buy Followers, so don't always get hung up on the shear number of Followers someone has. Those with thousands of "real" Followers will be on the $50+ range.
4. Go to the candidates Twitter account and look at the byline at the bottom of each status update. If all of the "about X hours from ...." containTwitterFeed, HootSuite, or even Ping.FM this means that they are using a RSS feed to automate the posting to the account. So they tend to be very little engagement on those accounts.

Here is a nice Twitter advertising case study by Jeremy Schoemaker (but just know he was on Sponsored Tweets parent company, Izea's Advisory Board).

Hopefully this helps a bit. Let me know any strategies you may use.