Review: Twitter Promote Mode

Has a little bird recently told you that there is a way to get more out of your social media account with less effort? If so, it might be Twitter’s new Promote Mode that you have on your brain.

How it Works

For a $99 monthly subscription rate, Twitter will automatically promote up to ten tweets from your account per day. These tweets appear the same as all other promoted tweets — as ads with the “promoted” badge. Put simply, it’s a way to automate tweet promotion. In addition to promoting individual tweets, Promote Mode also runs a Promoted Account campaign to help attract new followers.  

If you opt for this service, you can still run ads on Twitter as a separate campaign. However, within Promote Mode, you are not able to choose which tweets are promoted, or allocate higher spend to tweets that are performing well.

You can select targeting for your promoted tweets, but you have to choose between interest targeting or geographic targeting and cannot do both. The targeting with this service is limited to up to five interests or locations.

The Good

• According to bloggers, Promote Mode does seem able to produce results that align with Twitter’s claims. Twitter proposes that the feature will help you reach an additional 30,000 people and gain an additional 30 followers per month.
• Setting up Twitter Promote Mode is easy and very user friendly. After all, the goal of the service is to maximize results with minimal effort.
• When using this feature, Twitter provides an analytics dashboard within the platform where users can clearly see the performance of their tweets separated between organic and promoted.

The Bad

• You cannot control which tweets are promoted and which are not with this service. The service may promote tweets that do not have the desired business impact, such as apologies or updates about service outages.
• Currently, Twitter Promote Mode benefits smaller accounts the most. Accounts with a smaller following are easier to grow than accounts that already have a well-established Twitter audience. According to Twitter, “accounts with up to 2,000 followers will see the most value.” The platform has said that they are also working on higher price plans for accounts with a larger established following but for now this feature may not be worthwhile for larger brands.
• The interest groups provided for targeting are pretty general and may not be applicable or useful to every brand. There are only 25 interest groups to choose from, which may not account for every audience your brand wants to target.
• Keep in mind that you can only target interest groups or locations, not both. For instance, if you are a business with more than five locations, then geographic targeting is probably not going to work well for you, as you would have to exclude some of your locations. If you turn to interest targeting, you will be capturing an audience with the psychographic characteristics of your target audience. But, if they live on the other side of the country, then this audience may not work well for your business either.  

 Is it worth it?

If you’re looking to spend little time and effort on social media and still see analytical growth on the platform, then Twitter Promote Mode might be for you. However, you usually get out of social media what you put in. With Promote Mode, you still have to create your own content, but it takes the strategy out of the advertising element of the platform. If you’re looking for a masterful Twitter presence with a clear link to ROI, it’s going to require careful planning and innovative strategy, which $99 per month just can’t buy.

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