What Do Twitter’s Conversational Ads Mean for Influencer Marketing

Twitter may be turning influencer marketing on its head with today’s introduction of Conversational Ads, which provides easy-to-use tools so any Twitter user can share brand messages with their followers.

Conversational Ads builds on previous Twitter marketing tools that help brands expand the reach of their marketing messages. The company describes the tool as a means of getting users to engage in organic conversations about products that combine branded messages with low-effort personalization the user can add.

The new feature adds a call to action button to Promoted Tweets and the interactive poll options already available from Twitter. When a user opts to click on a conversational ad hashtag button, a ready-made tweet is shown with the brand’s message, hashtag and photo/video, all of which can be modified by the user. Users that send the tweet (modified or not) to their followers get a thank you from the brand for being part of the conversation.

Beta users like Samsung and Lifetime already found creative ways to engage Twitter users with variable hashtags that users can vote on to add their voice to a conversation. For example, Lifetime asked users to vote on who won a singing contest, engaging users by asking their opinion and turning those expressions into further conversation about their show Pitch Slapped.

“The new feature is useful but we need to be careful about calling a conversation generated from it ‘organic’, as Twitter has said,” says Siobhan O’Neill, vice president of social strategy at Ayzenberg. “Organic conversation is what bubbles up out of the communities that gather around a topic or moment, and often a hashtag rises with it; see how the Community TV show’s fans reacted with #SixSeasonsAndAMovie, or something bigger, such as #JeSuisCharlie. Trying to create a conversation where one doesn’t exist is much harder.“

Added O’Neill, “Where this gets interesting is if brands use it to tap into conversations that already exist and creatively find a way to grow truly organic conversations by making it easier for users to participate. The Lifetime example works because those who watched Pitch Slapped are already talking about who won. The conversational ad just helps build and potentially start new conversations from what was already happening.”

What Do Conversational Ads Mean For Influencer Marketing?

Although conversational ads open an avenue for brands to pursue low-cost social messages from individual users, there is also the risk that users will modify the tweet in a way that does not line up with the brand’s message. While Twitter has tools to allow brands to target users more likely to be interested in their brand, there is also no guarantee that those users will interact with the tweet.

Staying on-brand is a concern with any use of user-generated content or influencer marketing. However, by working with social media creators that have been identified to have an affinity for a brand, marketers significantly increase the chance of a positive message that drives their goals and creative input that is more likely to resonate with audiences since it is built by someone who knows their followers well. Conversational ads can make influencer marketing more turnkey by providing a simple starting point for creative work social media influencers can layer on top of the brand’s content, allowing for easy scaling of a campaign across a large number of influencers.

(Photo credit: Twitter)