eMarketer Research Reveals Marketers Buy In to Promoted Tweets

This is a recent artcile found on eMarketer.

Twitter advertising is attracting more interest from marketers.

In November, the TWTRCON conference and oneforty, an online directory for Twitter tools, surveyed 110 business professionals, mostly from marketing and communications, about their interaction with Twitter’s Promoted Products suite.

Overall, the respondents were interested in using Twitter ads as a part of their marketing mix, with 51% of respondents somewhat or very interested in Promoted Products. However, 27% hadn’t made up their minds and 22% said they had no interest at all.

The survey also noted that many brands and marketers are waiting to see the return on investment and business effect of such programs before getting involved. Buying a Promoted Trend adds the brand or product to the top of Twitter’s Trends list; Promoted Tweets give prominent placement to tweets from the advertiser. A third ad format, Promoted Accounts, includes a branded account among the other accounts Twitter suggests a user should follow.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco in November, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said using Promoted Trends increased the conversation around a topic by three to six times, and that most advertisers return after they have tried the format. Recently, Radio Shack sponsored the Promoted Trend #IfIHadSuperPowers, and Pillsbury used Promoted Tweets to discuss holiday food and recipes.

Twitter users are starting to take notice of the ads. The TWTRCON-oneforty survey found that 37% of respondents have clicked on a Promoted Trend and 29% clicked on a Promoted Tweet.

However, Twitter has a lot to do to catch up to other popular ad formats. Only 11% of the TWTRCON-oneforty study respondents said their organizations had used Twitter’s Promoted Products so far, while 59% were using Google AdWords and 55% used Facebook ads.

In a survey of ad agencies conducted in Q3 2010 by STRATA, 87.9% of respondents said they were likely to use Facebook advertising; less than half as many thought they would use Twitter ads.