We live in an age in which investments in advertising on social networks produce unprecedented returns. Nonetheless, the lack of available tools to actually measure the effectiveness of social campaigns in terms of sales increase has always been a concern for marketers and companies investing in these platforms.
To this end, a significant contribution has come from Twitter and Compete, which conduced a joint study on the effectiveness of tweets for sales increase.
The survey was conducted on a sample of 2,600 US nationals who receive promotional tweets from 700 companies (including Amazon, Nike e Wal-Mart) on the twitter.com website (therefore excluding accesses from smartphones and tablets). Then the results were compared with those obtained from two control groups, one consisting of Twitter users who had not seen any promotional tweet from companies, and another one of generic Internet users.
The study pointed out very interesting findings:
39% of users who had received promotional tweets from companies subsequently purchased on the websites of these businesses, compared with 33% of Twitter users who had not seen promotional tweets and 27% of generic Internet users. This result was found repeatedly regarding all the categories of surveyed products (health products, sports, books, cosmetics, etc).
Another particularly significant data consists in the existence of a “saturation point”, after which the viewed promotional tweets do not produce a growth of sales. A single promotional tweet achieves a conversion rate of 36.3%, while 12 tweets achieve 51.4%. Usually more than 12 promotional tweets published by a company can be a double-edged sword, since it could be perceived as “spam” by users.
The study was commissioned by Twitter, but the findings will be highly interesting for all companies and marketers to decide where to invest.
