Celebrity Endorsement Sites That Actually Work!!

Twitter is getting ready to roll out it’s attempt to dip a few toes into social endorsements, but failing to even get knee deep in celebrity endorsements with it's new ad platform. This sounds like it should be fantastic news for us marketers on Twitter. Finally a self-serve platform that allows us to tap in to the rapidly growing Twittersphere. So why are we not excited?

The reality is that Twitter’s new ad platform is likely to fail, and those tweet ads that do succeed will almost certainly be in the business of brand exposure rather than any kind of traffic arbitrage ROI. That sounds alright for some. But for most of us, this is 2-3 years past-due and is a huge disappointment when their attempt to leverage celebrity endorsements. It looks as if third party celebrity retweet networks such as celebrityretweets.com or new forms of celebrity endorsements such as paying celebrities to follow brands on famousfollowers.com will remain the new choice for celebrities to make money on Twitter that actual give marketers tangible ROI.


Below are some problems with the new Twitter ad platform:

The entire Twitter ad platform is to be based on keyword search terms.
“As we previously described, the new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries.”
Sounds pretty sensible. If a user is searching for coffee (for whatever reason), maybe Starbucks can get away with promoting their new beverage. But what kind of percentage of Twitter users actively use search? How does this effect the celebrity retweet?

My own tweeting and retweet habits involve perusing through the updates of my friends, coming up with the odd smart arse status, and every once in a while checking the trending topics tab on the right. I rarely, if ever, bother to use Twitter search. And yet this is how the ads are to be displayed. You’re looking at only a tiny percentage of Twitter’s relative traffic actually being exposed to ads. It’s hardly a new dawn for social endorsements or celebrity endorsements.

The second, and perhaps more worrying, topic covered in the announcement raises up the dirty issue of a performance based quality score.

“A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.”

I just don’t quite understand the logic behind this when trying to build engaging branded social endorsements. If an advertiser is paying by CPM, the performance shouldn’t matter. The last thing we want to be worrying about is some magic algorithm to determine how many clicks, replies and retweets we need to be receiving to keep our advertising campaign alive.

If an advertiser is paying by the click…fine. A quality score is necessary. But on a CPM basis, why Twitter would want to complicate a simple equation is beyond me. Particularly considering the advertisers likely to be using the celebrity endorsement services which are in the “spreading brand awareness” target directive.

The Twitter ad platform has failed to leverage the hundreds of millions of social media users actively on Twitter to drive measurable connections between top-tier celebrities with top-tier consumer brands. The only leading alternative is to use celebrity endorsement networks or other types of celebrity endorsements if you want return on investment on your social marketing Initiatives.

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