6 ms·

How we used Twitter ads to generate word-of-mouth hype

38 points by dorkitude 14y ago

mwetzler 14y ago
saul colt is amazing! he told us about how he used a cardboard banana stand (a la arrested development) as a conference booth and gave out free bananas to market one for one of his companies.
awwstn 14y ago
Good work, sir!
- dorkitude 14y ago
  Thanks! Just a small hack, but it took like 30 minutes :)
ISL 14y ago
And now, with a front page HN post, that effective hype has probably more than doubled!
- mwetzler 14y ago
  True! I also tweeted @saulcolt about the post and he really liked it! Then he retweeted it. He has over 9k followers; not bad :)
nedwin 14y ago
Did you get much / any negative sentiment?
- mwetzler 14y ago
  The only negative tweet (which was't even negative) was: "@keen_io Don't worry, I don't click on link bait. Tell me what you do if you want your product and not just name get my attention." He was friendly. We tweeted back an forth and turns out even though he didn't like the ad style, he still went to our site!! :) "@keen_io I typed it. Curiosity got the best of me. Good luck converting, you're on my shortlist. I was just thinking of analytics today.
hayksaakian 14y ago
Did this actually translate to people using your product or service? You can pay people in india and china to click your link 1,000,000 times, but that means nothing if you have 0 conversions at the end of the day. While I DO think the ad was clever, and people would have looked into you due to curiosity, I doubt the general populace is interested in an analytics as a backend platform. While you've made a compelling argument that twitter ads can generate hype, you have not really shown whether that hype amounts to anything of value.
- mwetzler 14y ago
  I was wondering if someone was going to ask that :) We got a bunch of new accounts created, several times more than we would get in a normal day (though not a huge amount). The percentage of these twitter visitors to our site that created accounts was really low. Like you said, the average curious twitter person is not in the market for analytics infrastructure. Something like a technical blog post has a much higher conversion rate, since it attracts more technical folks interested in that specific thing. But it is also much more costly (in terms of time) to produce. We're learning as we go with this marketing stuff, but seems like more hits on the site is always a good thing. There's always some unquantifiable amount of "value" you get from building brand awareness.
  - hayksaakian 14y ago
    also, how would you say it compares to CPC ads via google? adwords kw tool says that there's low competition for 'analytics backend' it'd be interesting to know how twitter ads compare to more 'known' networks like adsense as far as ultimately increasing your user base.
    - mwetzler 14y ago
      We've just started trying out adwords and have a bunch of different phrases. Analytics backend wasn't one of them, so I just added it. Thanks for the tip! Looks like avg CPC for adwords is $0.58, but we've only gotten a few clicks so far and we have a low max price set. Not much of a sample size. The 6.4 cents per click for the twitter stuff is a CRAZY CHEAP price. Though it does have lower conversion, it might come out competitively when we calculate price per signup.
james4k 14y ago
I guess this blog post was one of those 100 ideas? (not trying to be cheeky; you seem to be doing great, and keen.io looks great)
- mwetzler 14y ago
  hehe. this particular post wasn't planned, since we didn't know that the twitter thing was going to be successful. however, we have an overall mindset that sharing our learnings on our blog is a good idea since we are interested in working with other startups.

38 points by dorkitude 14y ago

saul colt is amazing! he told us about how he used a cardboard banana stand (a la arrested development) as a conference booth and gave out free bananas to market one for one of his companies.

awwstn 14y ago

Good work, sir!

dorkitude 14y ago
Thanks! Just a small hack, but it took like 30 minutes :)

ISL 14y ago

And now, with a front page HN post, that effective hype has probably more than doubled!

mwetzler 14y ago
True! I also tweeted @saulcolt about the post and he really liked it! Then he retweeted it. He has over 9k followers; not bad :)

nedwin 14y ago

Did you get much / any negative sentiment?

mwetzler 14y ago
The only negative tweet (which was't even negative) was: "@keen_io Don't worry, I don't click on link bait. Tell me what you do if you want your product and not just name get my attention." He was friendly. We tweeted back an forth and turns out even though he didn't like the ad style, he still went to our site!! :) "@keen_io I typed it. Curiosity got the best of me. Good luck converting, you're on my shortlist. I was just thinking of analytics today.

hayksaakian 14y ago

Did this actually translate to people using your product or service? You can pay people in india and china to click your link 1,000,000 times, but that means nothing if you have 0 conversions at the end of the day. While I DO think the ad was clever, and people would have looked into you due to curiosity, I doubt the general populace is interested in an analytics as a backend platform. While you've made a compelling argument that twitter ads can generate hype, you have not really shown whether that hype amounts to anything of value.

mwetzler 14y ago
I was wondering if someone was going to ask that :) We got a bunch of new accounts created, several times more than we would get in a normal day (though not a huge amount). The percentage of these twitter visitors to our site that created accounts was really low. Like you said, the average curious twitter person is not in the market for analytics infrastructure. Something like a technical blog post has a much higher conversion rate, since it attracts more technical folks interested in that specific thing. But it is also much more costly (in terms of time) to produce. We're learning as we go with this marketing stuff, but seems like more hits on the site is always a good thing. There's always some unquantifiable amount of "value" you get from building brand awareness.
- hayksaakian 14y ago
  also, how would you say it compares to CPC ads via google? adwords kw tool says that there's low competition for 'analytics backend' it'd be interesting to know how twitter ads compare to more 'known' networks like adsense as far as ultimately increasing your user base.
  - mwetzler 14y ago
    We've just started trying out adwords and have a bunch of different phrases. Analytics backend wasn't one of them, so I just added it. Thanks for the tip! Looks like avg CPC for adwords is $0.58, but we've only gotten a few clicks so far and we have a low max price set. Not much of a sample size. The 6.4 cents per click for the twitter stuff is a CRAZY CHEAP price. Though it does have lower conversion, it might come out competitively when we calculate price per signup.

james4k 14y ago

I guess this blog post was one of those 100 ideas? (not trying to be cheeky; you seem to be doing great, and keen.io looks great)

mwetzler 14y ago
hehe. this particular post wasn't planned, since we didn't know that the twitter thing was going to be successful. however, we have an overall mindset that sharing our learnings on our blog is a good idea since we are interested in working with other startups.