Should you use promoted tweets for news, collateral, and visuals?

At our recent webinar on how to successfully differentiate your products and services at HIMSS, we had some really good questions generated. Here’s a popular one:

Would love to get your thoughts on promoted tweets. As many vendors, we’re going to have a lot of news, collateral and visuals we’re sharing around HIMSS13 so I have been toying with the idea of talking to marketing about putting money towards promoted tweets.  I thought it might help our tweets stand out above the hundreds of thousands of other folks using the #HIMSS13 hashtag leading up to and at the show.

John Lynn sent out a great answer, which I’m including here:

I think promoted tweets are interesting.  You just have to be really careful in how you use them.  Because they stay at the top of the stream often, it can actually have a negative effect on the users that see them.  I know in some Twitter chats I’ve done, multiple people have tweeted how a promoted tweet was kind of annoying seeing it over and over again.  I thought the same thing, and I didn’t tweet it.  So, I assume the feeling was common.

The other concern was that the promoted tweet wasn’t all that applicable to the chat that was happening (I think it was a P90X tweet or something).  So, would the response have been different with one that’s more relevant.  Maybe?  Once again, it probably depends on how much they see it.  It’s like the commercial on TV that you see over and over that makes you want to shoot the TV.  Same idea.

I think if done a little it could be worth trying.  Also, another way to get a similar effect is to get lots of people doing the Twitter RT of a tweet you did.  In many Twitter clients they’ll highlight a tweet that has been RT’d in mass.  That takes a great tweet or some good coordination to make it happen though.

Let us know what you think about promoted tweets.

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