It’s not a secret. Twitter’s Ad Revenue growth has slowed to a crawl. Ad revenue in Q4 2016 increased by a whopping 0% year-over-year. Ouch.
In the digital advertising space, companies don’t mind trying the next big thing. Until of course they don’t get the results they are looking for (typically quality conversions or other measurable ROI).
One of the problems is with Twitter’s upper management, who pushed towards more expensive ads, was trying to offer a premium ad experience. Unfortunately, Twitter is not Google or Facebook, and the only premium Twitter seems to offer, is the price.
Twitter is one of fastest ways to ways to spend your money on brand campaigns to get people engaging with your content. But if you’re looking for conversions and actual sales, Twitter simply falls short in this area.
This does not mean that Twitter Ads will not work for you, but it does mean you have to do extra due diligence on your ad campaigns. This of course takes away time and budget from your other platforms.
Google owns the internet (for now at least, but we all know this could change down the road), and Facebook has real people to advertise to.
Running campaigns on both Google’s vast network (Search, Display, Video) and on Facebook is quite enough to get all the reach, clicks, and conversion you could ever afford. There’s no end in sight on the spend you could do.
However, unlike with Google and Facebook, you need really big pockets to advertise on Twitter to get something out of it. Those engagements simply don’t come cheap! You could pay something like $3 for someone to interact with your Twitter post, so imagine how much it would cost to try to generate nothing more than someone liking your post for example. Yikes!
During the last few years, Twitter has repeatedly defended themselves, often making statements that they revolutionized the way people communicate and that they will do it again.
In all due time, Twitter might do just that. But it seems that digital marketers have been seemingly avoiding the platform, and spending more on Google and Facebook. That’s because in digital advertising, there is a huge onus on producing measurable results.
One thing to keep in mind however, is Twitter is not an indicator of the digital spend trend. Many companies are investing more and more into digital ads, and the trends are only set to accelerate through 2017, 2018, and beyond!
