Not long ago I got a comment on my Facebook payed advertising post that I should try BuySellAds.com. Well, I jumped right into the idea, after all I was planning on doing new interesting marketing experiments. On BuySellAds you can find basically two types of payed advertising: 1) adversiting on other sites with banners (icon size, thumbnail size, huge top banner, basically any size) or 2) adverstise on Twitter with a tweet!

I’m not going to talk about the first one now. It is a bit longer campaign (30 days at least), and I haven’t started it yet – I’m overwhelmed with stuff to do right now. But I will definately write down my experiences after the campaign is over. I imemdiately tried out the Twitter advertising on the other hand, hoping that it will generate roughly 50-100 views in a day.

Why did I think that? Well there are many-many sites that offer advertising on Twitter, most of them for $10 per tweet. There are a few higher priced options as well (the highest was $200, but the twitter profile had multiple hundreds of thousand followers). I picked out the best and cheapest option available: 26-27 thousand followers and $10 per tweet. Now I roughly reviewed the quality of the followers, but at almost 30 thousand it is virtually impossible to make a correct estimate on this.

What do I mean by quality follower? I consider a real person a quality follower. There are many-many companies on Twitter with their news and ads and they are not quality followers. Chances are they won’t click on a link they see between their latest tweets. So I had a quick view and saw that there are relatively a fair amount of real people on the Twitter profile. So I paid the 10 bucks, wrote a catchy tweet with a link to one of my posts. Set a time, when I wanted it to be tweeted and waited.

My link was shared at around 6 pm, in the USA. Now this is definately the tricky part. What time will you share your link? I reasoned this way: from 9 am to 5 pm people work, so probably they won’t be sitting in front of the computer. They go home after that, maybe have dinner, and then sit down in front of the computer to check their favourite sites, and at that time my tweet will be roughly at the top.

Maybe my reasoning was off, I don’t know, but I had a really poor result. I used the Google URL shortener, so I could keep track of how many people clicked my link, the total amount was 15. This is a bad number. Though I have to say that it is still better than my Facebook advertising campaign, which really puts Facebook at the very bottom position. So I had to pay almost $1 per viewer, but I had a fairly good amount of time spent on the site! And this is a good thing! So this puts this type of advertising in a better position (pushing Facebook more and more down the drain).

I only had 15 views, but more than half of these people stayed and viewed 2-3 other pages. While with StumbleUpon I had a 90% bounce rate, so only 1 person would’ve stayed.

So to summarize: picking a Twitter profile with a huge number of quality followers is very important. But the trickiest (maybe impossible) task is to put your tweet out there in a good time, when the highest number of people can see it. I say it may be impossible, because I’ve bben experimenting with Twitter and found out that if I post 8-10 tweets with roughly 10-20 seconds apart, then I can get much more views in total on my tweets than if I post only one tweet every 2 hours. I don’t really get it yet how this works, but my statistics show this result.

So happy tweeting! And share your experiences below!