Is Twitter an effective marketing channel? I ran an experiment to find out!

This is my first post on this forum! I'm excited to learn from this community, as well to contribute where I can.

BRIEF INTRODUCTION:
My goal here is not to self promote at all. There's no link to my website or "bonus downloads". This is me just sharing with you what I’ve learned, and the results of my experiment to determine the effectiveness of Twitter as an acquisition channel.

If you found this interesting, let me know and I'll continue to post my experiments on my journey to 10,000 subscribers.

Below is the exact experimental design I created to test this channel out. I’ll give you the exact steps, numbers, results, and findings.

Let’s begin…

OBJECTIVES:

1. Develop social proof by gaining ~300 twitter followers within two months.
   
   
2. Determine effectiveness of Twitter to increase website traffic/email subscribers by automatically following/liking twitter accounts so they visit my profile, and see the link.

BACKGROUND:

Twitter is a great tool to see lists of people who fit your targeted demographic by looking at similar companies and competitors. For example, my target market is young entrepreneurs, I could target people who follow Forbes, Tim Ferris, Entrepreneur, etc...

The whole idea behind following targeted users is that after you follow them, some will visit your profile and potentially click on the link to your landing page, thus driving traffic.

Furthermore, let's say 10-15% of the users will follow you back, as long as you keep following a bunch of people, this would be a steady way to grow your follower base.

The two main benefits of this are: 1) it builds a list of targeted users you can interact with, and to a smaller degree 2) it adds social proof when people are looking at your website.

Due to these two main benefits, I have this method ranked pretty highly in my prioritization list.



HYPOTHESIS

1) If successful, my twitter following will increase by 300 followers, because of the following assumptions:

• Follow 100 users per day.
  
  
• 10% will follow me back
  
  
• 1-3 new signups per day

2) If successful, I will obtain 30 new email signup because of the following assumptions:

• 10% of the people who follow me back will visit my website and subscribe

EXPERIMENT DESIGN:

Step 1) Setup the twitter bot to automatically follow and unfollow users

Basically follow the instructions on http://www.programmingformarketers.com/automatic-twitter-followers/. The bot has a lot of capabilities such as targeting keywords and sending an automatic reply. However, for the purposes of this experiment, I will only use the follow and unfollow feature.

Once a day, I'll run a python script to follow 100 people.

Note: For twitter accounts that have less than 2000 followers, you can follow up to 2000 people. However, I do not want to run the risk of getting picked up by Twitter for aggressive following. I've heard from general sources that 100 people per day is safe, and up to 110% of your follower number.



After each week, I'll run the unfollow python script to balance my follower/following ratio so it doesn't seem like I'm just spamming for follows (which I am).



Step 2) Create a list of twitter accounts that are likely to have my target demographic

I pretty much googled "Best twitter accounts for entrepreneurs" and created my list that way. Some of the accounts I targeted were: @Young_Ent, @Tferriss, @patflynn, @GaryVee, @DJKhaled (lol).

RESULTS:

Gaining a targeted twitter audience: EFFECTIVE
In 30 days, I was able to follow 3000 different people which resulted in 359 twitter followers and a conversion rate of 12%.





By targeting users inside @YoungEnt, the majority of my followers are comprised of my users who are interested in business, technology, and entrepreneurship.




In summary, the twitter bot is an effective method to grow my twitter account followers with users who fit my target demographic.

Gaining Email Subscribers: INEFFECTIVE
Over the course of the month, 36 (10% of folloers) unique website visitors were a result of twitter. Of those 36 unique website visitors, 6 (17%) of them resulted in new email subscribers, or a conversion rate of 2%

Therefore, this twitter experiment was ineffective in obtaining new email subscribers

LEARNINGS

1. The twitter bot is effective in obtaining new followers with my targeted demographic
   
   
2. Mass following accounts is an ineffective method to brining traffic to my website

FOLLOW UP ACTIONS

1) Continue to run the twitter follower and target 1000 followers by the end of March

2) Start experimenting the effectiveness of interacting with twitter users by:

- Use Buffer to schedule tweets to reach out to my audience

- Setup keywords and actually REPLY & COMMUNICATE to users. Use TweetDeck.

- Twitter Cards to make it easy for people to subscribe within Twitter

DON'T BE A STRANGER

Have any questions? Reply to this post.

Have any advice/suggestions or anything at all? I’m still a noob, please reply and let’s discuss!

You can also email me at or send me a message on FB

 

twitter and facebook are two networks that are very easy to screw up when it comes to marketing. A majority of people on these sites want to follow real people and real people only follow things that are genuinely interesting to them. If you aren't a legitimate business or product and update your profile with overly aggressive advertising you will simply be unfollowed or removed from news feeds. Once someone removes you from the news feed you'll most likely never be seen again from that perspective. Everything always goes back to the question ... Does your product / service / business provide something that people really want to pay attention to?

 

You're correct, it's very important to push valuable content and not just spam. I'll pretty much be following the "jab, jab, right hook" philosophy. That'll be the next part of the experiment where I start actually pushing out content to the audience, and actually engaging with followers.

I'm pretty confident and proud of the content I have when people subscribe to my newsletter, so I'm pretty excited to start the next phase of the experiment (pushing content to twitter instead of just following accounts).

 

I do not think twitter is the best marketing tool; Think this, someone has 5k followers, do you really think
they are sitting at twitter home waiting for your message? most likely not, twitter is one of those things
you catch someone by chance, someone was there when you posted, at the right time, thats it...
if you have something to offer, maybe they stick around, maybe they dont...
twitter marketing is nothing more then a numbers game....

 

I reckon once you start pushing genuine content without looking all spammy and engage with others you will have a higher percentage visiting your website and eventually turn into email subscribers depending on how good your site is.

How is the design of your twitter profile? And what is your icon there? As I think this will determine whether someone will follow you back as well as usually your icon will be the first thing they'll see. Depending on your demographic you could post content during certain times when people usually check their twitter so your content gets seen by a wider audience. So I think typically before work, during lunch time and after work and before people sleep are the main times people check their feed on twitter

 

My profile design sucks, however, I have many things to do, sooner or later I will get around to it.
I got 50pin followers today, and I still do not really know pinterest is all about, but
hey, what do i care, it is still all about social media so I just play the part...

 

Here's the design of my profile and icon - http://imgur.com/voFBajf

 

I love these kind of experiments keep it up, I will be visiting again

 

Feel free to signup to my newsletter to stay up to date - http://founderorigins.com

 

In my experience Twitter sucks for traffic. With 20k+ followers, i can push a spike of up to 75ish people on a great, relevant, timely article.

There is just no residual bump from it.

But, im interested in your well thought-out experiment because this is how you actually test things.

Well done!

 

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any marketing experiments that you ran? Or any other recommended reading on how to run marketing experiments?

I'm interested in how I can improve the format, and most importantly, which key metrics I should be tracking for each individual experiment.