On almost all my tweets, I often see that large ‘Promote’ button where Twitter offers a quick, easy few button presses to promote any specific tweet to a vast audience. With over 450 million active users (as at 2023) I thought I’d give it a try and see how a fast-turnaround ad would work with a budget of just £50 GBP.
My latest thriller novel, His Mother’s Lies, which is due for release on May 15 2023, recently dropped a pre-order deal price from £1.99 to 0.99p. Using the power of Twitter advertising, I chose to promote this for 24hrs on March 8 2023.
Following the 24hr advertising campaign with a small budget of £50 – my tweet gained 18,552 impressions (99% from the campaign). From this, I had 44 clicks to my novel on Amazon, 17 profile visits, 7 likes and 3 retweets. With a further look into Amazon pre-orders for the same period, I had gained 4 preorders.
While I was a little disappointed with the conversions to pre-orders, I was very surprised that in just one day, the visibility was in excess of 18K views. I am confident with a larger budget, over a number of days and potentially a more targeted approach, it would work well for author exposure but minimal sales value.
It was an interesting experiment that I would definitely try again if I was looking to increase engagement.
