Episode 28: The Elon Touch: Why Now Is the Time to Consider Twitter for Ads

Transcription:

Devin:

You’re listening to Digital Marketing Mondays. Each week, we bring you new and exciting content from around the marketing industry, and help give you, the marketer, insights into what’s happening. We’ll offer our advice and share some takeaways to help you develop better strategies for your marketing. Ideally, this will also help you improve your ROI as well. With that, let’s tune in to this week’s episode.

Hans:

Here we go, so Devin, the big news, or one of the big pieces of news out there right now is about Elon Musk buying Twitter, and basically owning it lock, stock, and barrel, and being able to do whatever the heck he wants to do with it, which is kind of interesting. If we look at his other ventures, starting with PayPal and SpaceX, and Tesla, he’s sort of got a magic touch here. So, I expect some changes. It’ll remain to be seen what those are, but I wanted to ask you: we’ve looked at Twitter and we’ve tried to use Twitter as an ad platform on behalf of clients. I think it’s safe to say that we have found it less effective for reaching a broad audience and doing good targeting. It’s been less effective than either Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook has been.

Hans:

But there’s a new sheriff in town. What are your thoughts about where Twitter might be going as far as what might interest our marketing friends out there?

Devin:

It’s a really interesting topic, and part of the reason I’m not surprised that this is taking place, this has definitely been the most popular platform that Elon loves personally, and we know that it pretty big impacts, whatever he tweets. So, it’s very unsurprising to me that this near-hostile takeover of Twitter is shaking out. We’ll put the politics aside for a second, because that’s a completely different conversation to want to dive into on this podcast, but I have had a lot of clients ask me this past week about this Twitter takeover, and what it might look like under the reigns of Elon Musk.

Devin:

I think there’s been two general schools of thinking that I’ve had about what might shake out. The first is that Elon may very well get rid of ads as an advertising revenue source for them, and look to have basically paid Twitter users that are getting this ad-free-

Hans:

[crosstalk 00:02:24] services?

Devin:

Yeah, yeah, basically paying for this platform as a service, so then they’re getting an ad-free experience. Think about it like a typical SaaS model in that case. Really, that’s an interesting approach. Not ideal in my mind because then we certainly don’t get that ad opportunity. So, I’m going to hope that that’s… Option number one, I’m hoping that that one does not take place in this future.

Hans:

Just as an aside, I think that if everybody has to pay to use Twitter, I think the number of Twitter users are going to go down dramatically, right?

Devin:

I would have to imagine.

Hans:

I would think it might be you get to do everything you can do today, but if you want the premium features, well then you got to pay a little more, and maybe to extend your reach like you want to reach a bigger audience you might have to pay. It’s kind of like a little bit what LinkedIn does or Facebook does, boosting your post, right?

Devin:

Yeah. Yeah, and so I think there’s already been some pretty clear indications from Elon directly that there’s going to be some cleanup that’s going to happen. He’s going to take the time and force his engineering team to get rid of the bots, go through user verifications. I think there’s also great opportunity ahead for him to look at some of these other ad-supported platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook to make some serious improvements.

Devin:

From a marketing and advertising perspective, those channels really struggle for advertisers. I think it’s a great brand awareness play if you’re completely fine with seeing just a bunch of impressions and maybe some clicks, but essentially no ROI or no attributable conversions, then sure. Add the platform in the mix.

Devin:

What I hope is that with this future, we’ll see some better formats that will be more attractive to advertisers, even if Twitter could have lead gen forms, which is very similar to what’s currently being offered inside of LinkedIn, or even similar to Inmail as well, this ability to advertise direct messages to folks. I think those are a couple of great formats that could be available with some minor tweaking.

Devin:

I’m hopeful that option two is where Elon goes, and allows the platform to continue being ad supported. It just gives more opportunities for advertisers to get in front of that right audience because I do think Twitter’s a massive platform. There’s a lot of users in it, and the daily active users, not higher than Facebook, but I think the actual engagement which people have is higher.

Devin:

So, it’s a really interesting platform from that perspective. That’s certainly what I’m very hopeful Elon will do once he does officially take ownership of the company.

Hans:

Cool. Cool. It’s interesting times, and we’ll have to see. Certainly, he’s got a pretty magic touch with other businesses he’s dealt with. I bet you there’s going to be some surprises here. I bet you he’s going to come up with some stuff that we haven’t mentioned and we wouldn’t even have dreamed of. So, it remains to be seen. It’s likely that I think it’s going to be a better platform for advertisers let’s say a year down the road. Stay tuned.

Devin:

Yeah, and I will say just one additional thought too is that, I think if you’re an advertiser and you have some extra funds currently available, it might even be interesting to try running some small number of Twitter ads currently, and then again later in October, November, December to see what the results actually look like. I do think just by getting rid of some of the bots and making users go through actual verification, that could pretty substantially up and improve the quality by itself, without doing anything else, just those two steps alone will help-

Hans:

Absolutely, yeah.

Devin:

… I think overall performance.

Hans:

That’s not hard to do.

Devin:

No.

Hans:

That’s not really hard to do. Yeah.

Devin:

No, so if you’re an advertiser and you have some extra funds kicking around, and you have some good brand awareness content that you’re okay to put out there, I would say give it a shot. See what happens.

Hans:

Cool. Cool.

Devin:

Yeah, and go from there.

Hans:

Excellent. All right, well thanks, Devin. We’ll keep everybody posted as new things develop. That’s our take from here right now. Stay tuned for more.

Devin:

Thanks, Hans.

Hans:

All right, take care.

Devin:

Thank you so much for tuning in. We really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to engage with our content. Whether you’re watching on YouTube or subscribed on our podcast apps, we appreciate you taking the time. Make sure to leave a comment down below and let us know any feedback that you have for us. We’re always watching the comments and engaging in any way that we can. If you find this content useful, also make sure to subscribe or give it a big thumbs up. We appreciate it. Thanks so much.