Global digital marketing and communications leader
It’s not hard to grow,
But it is hard to harvest.
Only two threads per flower,
All of them handpicked.
Hands are what make it so valuable.
The warmth of your paella comes from sun-baked skin,
The luminosity of your rice from bright eyes,
The musty smokiness of your stew from another’s sweat.
From their hand to your mouth.
From Kashmir to Kensington.
One person feeds another
across continents.
A pebble thrown into an empty pot rattles,
Ricocheting around the void,
Clinking, clanking, echoing.
The social media activist prattles,
A single thought bouncing around his mind,
Typing, posting, retweeting.
There is no nuance,
There is no delete,
His dedication is absolute,
Unless he has to use his feet.
With the launch of Promote Mode, has Twitter built the ad product small businesses need?
Twitter has launched a new ad product, called Promote Mode, that’s targeted squarely at small businesses and individuals seeking an easy way to build an audience on the network.
For a monthly fee of $99 Promote Mode will automatically promote your tweets and your account. No need to set up ads, just tweet as normal and the algorithm will take care of the rest. Twitter says that those who tweet regularly and subscribe to Promote Mode should gain an additional 30 followers a month and reach an additional 30,000 users on top of their natural reach.
Promote Mode also allows some simple targeting by allowing subscribers to choose up to five interests or cities or locations within a country. At the moment, the product is only available in the US and the UK. Roll out is expected soon in Japan too.
Early sightings of Promote Mode in the wild have shown the limitations of this approach. If, like in the example below, you’re not producing lots of tweets that would suit an advert format, some fairly mundane things will be promoted.
Despite the potential for odd tweets being promoted, this is a genuinely useful product. It takes out the (perceived) hassle of putting together Twitter ads and fixes a price in advance, thereby addressing two issues all small business owners will recognise: time and cost certainty.
For Twitter, it’s also unlikely to cannibalise its core ad business. Those who want tighter targeting or to run bigger campaigns will unlikely show interest in this product.
The launch of Promote Mode delivers one additional thing: a public benchmark of price and performance. We all advise clients that reach and follower numbers have severe limitations as performance metrics, but plenty of people are obsessed with them. If Twitter thinks it can deliver you 30 followers and reach 30,000 users for $99, those running paid campaigns need to outperform that price.
Social media is awash with quotes. Some accurate, some less so. Some deeply cherished by those who post them, others seemingly churned out of some quote sausage machine. Many love them, many loathe them. However, what is not in doubt is that they elicit engagement.
People are drawn to simple, clear messages. If those messages bring simplicity to complex issues, well then everything’s rosy. But there comes a point when something is made too simple. When so much context is removed that the message is meaningless.
There is an excellent documentary series on Netflix called Abstract. In the first episode, Christoph Niemann, who designs covers for the New Yorker, discusses abstract design. He uses the example of communicating love. Everyone uses a heart shape. From a design perspective, the heart shape is the most abstract a drawing of a heart can be before it becomes meaningless. It doesn’t have the complexity of ventricles and arteries, but it is definitely a heart. If you made it more abstract, by turning it into a square or a circle, it would go from simplified to meaningless.
Let’s apply the same thinking to language. A popular refrain in communications at the moment is that there is no longer B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business), there is only business to human. The idea being that in the age of social media and the blurring of work and personal lives, we need to communicate to people as people. It is superficially appealing, but it is meaningless.
B2B is a useful simplification. It tells us, at a very top level, that we’re communicating to people who are making decisions for businesses. Similarly, B2C tells us we’re communicating to an audience who are making decisions as consumers.
Business to human, tells us we’re communicating to people. What’s helpful about that? It is shorn of useful context. It is the equivalent of communicating love using a square.