[Updated: June 2021]
What is Twitter Promote Mode?
Twitter Promote Mode is essentially a subscription service that will automatically promote your tweets so that you don’t have to create Twitter ads or campaigns yourself. It is the hassle free, quick and easy way to promote your content on Twitter. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and Twitter Promote Mode comes with a price tag of £79 per month.
For as long as your subscription runs, Twitter Promote Mode will act as an ‘always-on’ service, promoting your first 10 tweets of the day. Your retweets, quote tweets, and replies will not be promoted, and tweets need to meet Twitter’s Quality Policy for them to be promotable.
Twitter predicts that on average, an account will reach 30,000 more users, and will gain around 30 followers a month. Ultimately, Twitter Promote Mode is for the time-poor marketer who is looking to raise awareness for their organisation or brand and looking to increase their followers.
How to Use Promote Mode
Once you sign up for the subscription, you can select your targeting options. These options are not as sophisticated as Twitter Ads targeting, and will not suit every business. Users are only able to target either location or interests, not both. These interests are also extremely broad yet limited, where you can only select 5 interests from a selection of 25.
For us, a Digital Marketing Agency, the targeting options do not lend themselves to our target audience. We had to select the next best interest targeting that was the most relevant to our content: Business, Technology and Computing, and Travel.
Once you’ve chosen your targeting options, all that’s left to do is tweet for them to be automatically promoted to a large audience. There’s no doubt that Promote Mode offers the easiest and quickest way to advertise on Twitter. But, does it provide good results?
We Tested Twitter Promote Mode for a Month
Over the course of the month, our Tweets earned 56,000 impressions. This is a hefty increase in impressions compared to the month before. As a result of Twitter Promote Mode, we reached an additional 29,330 people and gained 32 new followers. These results align with Twitter’s predictions that accounts will reach on average 30,000 more people, and gain on average 30 new followers each month.
Despite a clear increase in impressions and reach, the majority of engagement on our tweets, such as likes, link clicks and retweets, still came from organic reach. Looking at the analytics below for our top-performing tweet from the month, we can see that we received more organic impressions, engagements and clicks than we did from promoted.
Is Twitter Promote Mode Worth It?
If you want to reach a large audience, gain more Twitter followers, and your target audience fit within the mere 25 targeting categories, then Twitter Promote Mode could work for you. But ultimately, the extra time spent on manually running and optimising a Twitter Ads Campaign will provide a much better return on ad spend in the long run.
The problem with Promote Mode lies in its lack of control. You are unable to control which tweets are promoted, when, or to who. Although we were able to reach a significantly larger audience over the course of the month, they weren’t the right people. Fundamentally, we didn’t gain any valuable results because the impressions we received were not valuable to our business or services.
Unlike managed social media campaigns, you can’t run ad sequencing or split testing, putting the performance of your ads at a disadvantage.
Over the course of a month, the £79 price tag only works out at £2.50 a day. If you were to utilise the full allowance of 10 promoted tweets a day, you would only be paying 25p per promoted tweet. Although Promote Mode may be a cheap, and quick, alternative to advertising on Twitter, it is not going to be as efficient or as successful as manually managing a Twitter campaign.
