Thread by @timsoulo

How we used Twitter to help launch Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (our new freemium product)..

..and generate ~15,000 registrations in the first 48 hours!

A thread 🙂

Step 1 - The countdown.

This product launch was a pretty big deal for us, so we decided it would be cool to "tease" the upcoming release with a "countdown" on Twitter.

We designed 5 pictures with numbers from 5 to 1 and shared them one by one at @ahrefs Twitter account.

Each of these tweets got around 30-40k Impressions and 1.5-2.5k Engagements.

Both ourselves and our community had quite a bit of fun guessing what we were about to launch. 😆

Looking back, I wish we'd run ads on this countdown to reach even more people and generate more buzz.

Step 2 - The landing page CTA.

AWT is a freemium product. And while it did have quite a few perks for our paying customers, there was no "action" for them to take on the AWT landing page.

So we decided to ask them to help us spread the news by retweeting our announcement tweet:

Step 3 - The friends.

We knew we needed to generate as much momentum as we can on the launch day..

So a week prior to launch we emailed a few dozen of our industry friends who have a decent following on Twitter and notified them of the upcoming launch, hoping for their support.

According to @ahrefs Content Explorer, the AWT landing page ended up being tweeted by 700+ people. Many of which have quite a large and active following.

We believe that we wouldn't get this kind of result without the help of our friends and our community!

Thank you, folks! ♥️

Step 4 - The ads.

We wanted to generate as much exposure as we can with our "launch tweet:"



So naturally, we invested in Twitter ads to expand our reach.

We started from an "Engagement" campaign of $400/day for a total budget of $2,000.

When we saw that it was going well (compared to the performance of our average promoted tweet), we decided to try switching to a "Clicks" campaign for $500/day with the same $2k budget.

This resulted in substantially cheaper clicks:

Engagement - $2.16 CPC
Clicks - $1.60 CPC

In total, our "launch tweet" has generated 564k Impressions and 6k link clicks.

Looking back at it, I think we should have invested more aggressively in Twitter ads (and experimented more).

But in the tumult of other launch activities we forgot to keep an eye on Tw ads 😖

That's it! 🙂

As you can tell, Twitter was quite an important channel for us in terms of generating attention to AWT launch.

I think Twitter is a much better platform for generating buzz compared to Facebook, LinkedIn or TikTok (just kidding).

Looking forward to your comments!