buying tweets & mentions (BuysellAds)

I bought a tweet from the BSA network (BuySellAds), it was fairly cheap, 20$ for a tweet, from a recognized brand within design/development, the account have 8k followers, and i asked them to tweet it at 11am, and they did, but the effect was totally lost, i got 5 clicks!

Sure, they do add a "*ad" to the end of each tweet, that might bring down CR abit, but seriously, 5 clicks?

So to my question, is this form for advertisement dead and buried? Or are there any success stories out there? Might there be other variables that affect the outcome? have twitter implemented some sort of Edge Rank system like Facebook has?

 

It's not buried and not even dead. It depeends on the message you asked them to tweet.

Whether that tweet was relevant to their followers and was it similar to what they tweet about or what people respond to. Before buying tweets, you need to do some homework. You need to check and review their timeline very carefully. Your tweet was posted on their time line, so you should have asked them for the best time to tweet, because they know their followers and when their followers are most active, and what sort of messages their followers respond to.

all the best for next time.

 

Thanks for replying,

I did check if they normally tweeted around that time, and the content i posted relates to a lot of their followers as i suspect a lot of them directly or indirectly use the kind of service i promoted. Although, i noticed that the account posts a lot of posts during a day (not that many ads though), maybe the response is low due to the fact that people cant follow everything they post. I just figuered that even with a poorly written post, i would get more then 5 clicks.

I will give BSA a few more goes, i like the idea of direct marketing through twitter, and they have some rather large brands connected as well.

 

yeah, you should try their service at least 3 - 5 times before making any perception. I know BSA very well and has been buying and selling ads/ tweets via BSA for last two years and touch wood my experience with them has been really good thus far. May be this time you can ask the person to tweet after their own tweets and if they get any response to any of their tweet. Do not fix time or day, just put this condition.

 

Thats a good idea, and i just want to make clear i'm not criticizing BSA, i really do believe they can deliver some serious traffic. My concern was more related to advertising on twitter in general.

 

A while back I purchased a gig on fiverr from a girl that had 30k followers. To make a long story short, I don't think I got any clicks as most of her followers were fake. Of course I didn't know that when I purchased the gig. I later went to her profile and checked as many "followers" as I could. I couldn't find a single real one. So, you do the math.

You also mentioned in another thread that you have an advertising budget set aside. Why, in the world, are you spending it on something other than AdWords and AdCenter? That's where your real customers are.

 

I probably tried it for the same reason you tried Fiverr? Finding new ways sets any business apart from everyone else, at least something to complement the mainstream alternatives. With that in mind, i know that the followers of the twitter account is not faked, or forced, as it is a large webdev/jquery blog i am following actively both through page and rss feed. BSA have several larger brands like TNW, Codrops, cult of mac, Logopond, etc etc.

 

Fiver - Avoid. If you want targeted leads from facebook then you need to create a system, analyse what the top facebook marketers do and try to emulate. Rather than spend $20 on a wasted tweet....go to addmefast.com - sign up, and earn points, you'll then be able to spend the points you earn on social marketing services...don't waste $20 on another tweet...

 

I agree with Adam. Fiver will give you the same effect. Its likely that the $20 you spent went to advertise on a network with 8,000 non-targeted, inactive followers. AddMeFast is good to build a base of mentions or retweets for presentation purposes only. Then you need to think outside the box and find a way to target your would-be followers with good content. Develop a system to find and seek them out. Once you've accomplished that and have a steady flow of people interacting with your brand, develop your rapport and try to get conversations going. You're might have to push things along at first but once you do you should see results quickly.

 

This. And if you're lazy to get points by yourself, I can help you
But seriously, buying a tweet for $20 is not cheap at all.

 

The problems with the big number of followers in the social media is that those followers are just a number. They are not active, in some cases they are not even human! and generally, if you just look at the last 10 tweets by the guy, you can have a very good idea of why the followers are not active.

You will either find the tweets to be very ir-regular, like whenever his heart desires, or when he gets a paid gig, or perhaps he hasn't tweeted for weeks...

 

Agree with @uttoransen. Most of the service providers already bought their own fake users to sell it for you...


I tried fiverr several times.
In term of marketing - only email spam was good.
Tweets, PR, etc - didn't preform well.
Designs - I bought simple designs several time - highly recommended


Regarding buysellads - I bought banners several times. I.E - I have an Arsenal chrome extension and I bought banner space on Arsenal website - I got few clicks only. You can argue and say the banner was maybe low quality or whatever, but the target audiences were 100% and still almost no clicks. I don't think I will work with them in the future.

 

I would want to see who is in their audience (followers). Also, Twitter follower counts can easily be faked, with thousands of fake accounts.