There are times where it’s too easy to tell that a message on Twitter and Facebook is more about general promotion than creativity. Usually, these are littered with some generic message, followed by a link and a hashtag added in, just for the sake of tying in to a popular brand or trend. However, one cyber vigilante is calling out these executives.
A Twitter account under the name @SocialLandlord allows the user, an anonymous former creative agency employee, to punish brands that post clearly promoted tweets. They do this with responses in the form of dollar bill emoji, posted multiple times.
This actually comes back on the advertiser, as this results in “engagement,” which, in the form of a reply, retweet or other form of clicking, gets them charged. According to executives that are familiar with such programs, the maximum bid for engagement can place anywhere between fifty cents to a dollar.
Digiday’s Shareen Pathak interviewed the mystery Twitterer, who speaks of “Twitter justice,” explaining how some companies can be too clearly called out for their non-personalized messaging. “As someone who works in the ‘creative industry,’ @SocialLandlord is a cry for help,” said the user. “I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the vast majority of brands active in the social space don’t know the first thing about social media.
“Marketers always jump at the chance to use a new social media platform to promote their products & services. However, only a fraction of them take the time to understand how the platform works and what makes content popular on that specific platform,” the user continued. ” Instead of trying to tailor their messages and give people what they want, they treat social media as a distress channel — a place where they can hit people in the head with their latest TV ad or latest piece of outdoor. Problem is, no one sits on Twitter all day hoping to ‘engage’ with branded content. It’s 2014, if you want people’s attention — you should earn it. And no, your ‘upload a selfie to win X’ competition isn’t gonna cut it.”
As far as a solution goes, @SocialLandlord keeps it plain and simple. “Brands need to remember what got them interested in social media marketing in the first place. In the early days, it was all about doing something creative that people would notice and talk about. It was about using social platforms in new ways — like when Burger King asked their fans to unfriend five people on Facebook for a chance to win a Whopper.
“Sadly, native advertising solutions like ‘promoted tweets’ and ‘Facebook sponsored posts’ are making brands lazy. Instead of coming up with something exciting and worthy of a spot in people’s news feeds, they simply pay for the right to invade people’s feeds with any old crap. That’s what gave me the idea. I thought it’d be funny to try and reclaim that space in a way. Twitter’s pricing model is engagement based — when a user clicks on a promoted tweet, the brand pays,” said the user.
What do you think? Should more companies take initiative when it comes to advertising on Twitter? (We’re all for it.)
Source: Digiday
