How Social TV Advertisers May Begin to Leverage Promoted Retweets

By Adam Flomenbaum 

social-rank-square_logoAs they tell it, Michael Schonfeld and Alex Taub built a simple tool “Most Valuable Follow” back in 2012 with no intention of turning it into a business. It informed brands about who their followers were and which were most valuable. The tool was shut down briefly, but brands kept coming back asking for it to be turned back on, and SocialRank was born.

In a recent post on the SocialRank blog, the company highlighted a recent trend in the Twitter advertising landscape: promoted retweets. Rather than using Twitter’s hallmark advertising solution to promote their own tweets, more and more brands are promoting tweets by others about the brand. A recent example is when Cisco leveraged a tweet from the NBA. From the SocialRank post:

The third example of a Promoted Retweet is when the @NBA and @CiscoSystems teamed up around the NBA Finals. While Cisco is a very large company, it doesn’t have the instant brand recognition that the NBA does. Cisco used Promoted Retweets to amplify their partnership with the NBA.

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Promoted retweets certainly have potential for social TV advertisers, and we asked SocialRank co-founder Alex Taub what this may look like.

Taub:

 In terms of TV, lets look at this hypothetical situation: What if the @AMC_TV handle promoted a retweet of a star of one of its TV shows?

Let’s take Aaron Paul, for example. His follow count on Twitter is 2.4 million vs. @AMC_TV’s 233,000 or @BreakingBad_AMC’s 965,000. He is clearly more recognizable and beloved on Twitter. If either of those handles used a Promoted Retweet of Aaron’s Paul’s tweet, the theory is that the tweet would be clicked on more and perform better.

Promoted Retweets enable the stars of the show (who are closest to the audience) to do the advocating. And most likely, fans will respond more positively to this than to a network’s self-promoted Tweet.

The Breaking Bad + Aaron Paul might be an outdated example because the show has ended, but I see this working with other shows and stars. Think Kerry Washington + Scandal, Ashton Kutcher + Two and Half Men, Lea Michele + Glee and more.

The picture below is a photoshopped idea of what it could look have looked like for Aaron Paul + Breaking Bad.

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