Thread by @jessejanderson

I bought $50 worth of Twitter ads for a popular atomic essay tweet.

Here's what I learned. 🧵👇

1/
I selected one of my more popular #ship30for30 atomic essays.

Prior to promotion:
- 9,320 impressions
- 819 engagements
- 30 profile clicks
- 55 likes
- 18 retweets
- 0 new follows

Nothing crazy, but one of my most successful essays.

https://twitter.com/jessejanderson/status/1365692771433123840

2/
These are the raw new numbers I received directly from the promotion:

- 7,663 impressions
- 1,248 engagements
- 30 profile clicks
- 72 likes
- 12 retweets
- 2 new follows

3/
Quick observations:

Engagement for the promoted tweet was almost double my organic traffic.

- 8.8% engagement via organic traffic
- 16.3% engagement via promotion traffic

Likes ratio was up as well:

- 0.6% organic
- 0.9% promotion

4/
This surprised me with a topic-specific tweet (ADHD), since Twitter didn't allow any targeting other than country/age/gender.

(I filtered to: United States, 21-55, any gender)

My hope was that it would resonate strongly for some and they would engage further.

5/
Here are 5 Key Takeaways:

1. Twitter estimated 4,000 impressions but my final number was 7,663.

Not sure if this is an algorithm trick to make me feel better (it worked) and more likely to use again (probably).

Under promise and over deliver.

6/
2. I was wrong about expected engagement.

I assumed engagement would be down due to the untargeted audience.

That said, I've only recently begun talking more about ADHD on my timeline, so my own follower audience isn't exactly targeted for ADHD either.

7/
3. Consider time of day.

It started in the evening, around 9pm Pacific, and the $50 was exhausted in a couple hours.

In the future, I would either do a longer campaign or start at a more targeted time of day that makes sense for my audience.

8/
4. I had 5 new newsletter subs during the promo period, I would guess 3-4 of those were directly connected.

The only way to find the newsletter signup would be visiting my profile or reading to the very last tweet at the end of the thread.

9/
5. Superfans.

This content resonated really strongly with a few people and they proceeded to read/like/retweet many of my other tweets about ADHD.

What's next?

Not sure, I may do some more experiments in the future. I'd like to try having an actual call-to-action for the newsletter without it feeling too sales-pitchy.

Thanks for reading.

And you can sign up here for ADHD tips. 😅
extrafocus.io