Should you advertise in Twitter streams? / we are social

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Should you advertise in Twitter streams?

by Robin Grant in News on 27 March 2009 at 14:29

Marketing carried a piece this week looking at whether brands should advertise in people’s Twitter streams, prompted by the appearance of ‘services’ like Magpie and adCause. Clearly, the short answer is no, but if you want the long answer:

Robin Grant, the managing director of social media agency We Are Social, warns against brands jumping in feet first. ‘Twitter is all about conversations and what these ad networks are trying to do is insert ads into that conversation stream which is inherently inappropriate,’ he says adding he won’t be advising any clients to advertise within Twitter streams.

Let me know if you think I’m being a little too simplistic…

Update: So perhaps I was being a little too simplistic – it’s worth reading Brian Morrissey’s thoughts on the subject.

Update 2: ReadWriteWeb looks into some use cases of Magpie (in a fairly negative light) and Graeme Wood follows up pointing out that, without disclosure, this sort of advertising may be illegal under UK and EU law…

tagged: adCause, advertising, Brian Morrissey, conversation, Magpie, marketing, Twitter

laurent

Well, I see advertiser becoming very aggressive (on some sites, I mouse over an ad without paying attention going from point A to point B and the ad takes 2/3 of my screen). I get angree and the brand in the ad gets a piece of that.
So no no inline advertising. Around is ok (if it's not too much).

mio

Twitter and most of the other social networking sites are all about dialogues, so business should be one of interlocutors. In the case of ads@twits there is no business as interlocutor! It's like you ask someone who knows you quite poor tell his friends about you. You'll tell them but what next? "This was not my car dude! If you have questions about it, go ask those guys in suites and pretty ties"? So silly.

Matt Rhodes

Yeah the short answer is no. There are so many better ways of advertising. And many better ways of using Twitter.

It's also very difficult to use Twitter like this and ensure that your advert will get significant exposure. Once you are following more than a handful of people on Twitter your stream updates so often that unless you happen to be looking at the stream at the time the ad goes up they you're likely to miss it.

And why advertise at all when you get much better results from actually using Twitter to engage people. Don't try to force an old format (that worked in the media it was designed form) into a new one.

The answer is 'no' for so many reasons.

Adam Lewis

Don't think it will be stopping certain brands carrying out this practice tbh...

steve wexler

"Twitter is all about conversations"... Sez who? Twitter is becoming what it will be, not what it was...

Lilian Mahoukou

I think companies advertising within Twitter streams just kill their marketing budget.

They should be focused on creating an outstanding product/service, taking advantage of word-of-mouth and building a strong community. This takes time, and skipping all these stages lead to poor community relationships and failure. We are great at ignoring ads. With higher conversation frequencies on Twitter, these ads quickly becomes noisy.

charlesfrith

Social media is a like a cocktail party. One can introduce but interruptions are not tolerated. The girl giving out free beers in the Tiger Beer dress is assumed to have no conversation of merit and manners are all important for making a good impression.

Albert_Maruggi

I think you can always turn off the channel or the promoter if it gets too much for you. But remember Twitter is like radio, so you need a run of schedule, old school term, for several ads per day at different times to cover the greatest percentage of the twitter's followers.

The sad part is that in this tactic is there is nothing new, it's endorsement plus interruption. I'd rather see a Twitterer building more context around the advertisers, even having Scoble host an objective interview, ask tough questions. The Seagates of the world can handle it.

That's the way social media becomes something different, more valuable for both the advertiser and the advertisee (that's me)

robert_birse

I have to disagree strongly with Albert. In no way is Twitter like radio. It it user generated and radio is not. Not even talk radio is user generated - it has user input but is controlled by the station and the presenter.

I do agree with building context around advertisers. If they can generate a topic interesting enough to attract followers then go for it but DO NOT interrupt.

If social media is about building relationships and conversations are a part of that process then surely it is vital to bear in mind that a conversation is by nature about taking turns and contributing. Barging into conversations and shouting at people will not win you any friends.

Also: I think that the research showing that young people are turned off by brands advertising via sms and text messaging is very relevant here. I see Twitter and SMS to be selective and personal and no place for intrusive advertising/marketing.

betweeted

Twitter needs to be about personal introduction. If someone is going to pay for an ad, the value isn't simply in impressions anymore, it's in the fact that a twitterer realized value in your content and decided to share it with his/her followers. That is what should be compensated. Feeding ads directly into the stream without the user's consideration is senseless.