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So what did the Red Cross get from Twitter for $100,000?

On Wednesday the American Red Cross used a promoted trend on Twitter to advertise their Red Cross Month. The price of obtaining a promoted trend has fluctuated recently but the going rate seems to be somewhere between £60,000 and £90,000 per day. This is a lot of money for a charity to spend on just 24 hours worth of advertising activity so I wanted to drill into it and find out just what was achieved.

The tweets and links

Clicking on the promoted trend ‘Red Cross Join Us’ shows up the latest Red Cross tweet with other users’ tweets underneath related to the promoted trend. During the time the ad ran the Red Cross featured the two tweets shown above.

The call to action in the first tweet is a little odd as ‘donating’ tweets will be a new concept to most people but, on the other hand, it sounds like a very easy ask that should have been good for user engagement. I was pretty surprised that they used bit.ly to shorten their link considering that the URL shortening service makes the stats on their short URLs publicly available. Still, it’s helpful for those of us that want to take a look at the effectiveness of their campaign. Taking a look at the stats we can see that the bit.ly link was clicked on, at the time of writing, around 500 times. So far, not so good.

The second tweet was a much more traditional marketing message asking people to sign up for Red Cross Month activity. Although this shortened link seems not to have been done using the bit.ly service, adding a ‘+’ symbol to the tweet reveals that the URL is still using the service which means that we can also get stats on the number of clicks. The data shows that this link was clicked on, at the time of writing, just over 1750 times.

Which is how many conversions?

These figures are, I’m sure you’ll agree, fairly paltry considering the expenditure and exposure but lets drill a little bit deeper. If we aggregate the clicks from these two links and assume a very generous 10% conversion rate for the two calls to action we end up with less than 250 conversions. Assuming a more realistic conversion rate of around 2% we only get around 50 conversions.

So what went wrong and what went right?

If the American Red Cross paid full price for their promoted trend they can’t help but be disappointed with the result. However, one thing they will have got in spades is brand recognition. Sitting on the top of the Twitter trends list for 24 hours is absolutely great for promoting their brand and their campaign.

What I did find a little odd was that the promoted trend was visible to someone who was viewing the top London trends. It seems to me that targeting UK Twitter users with a promoted trend aimed primarily at those in the States would elicit a far lower response rate and deliver a lower return on investment. I did also find that the Red Cross Month landing page left a lot to be desired. There is a lot of dense copy and the calls to action are barely distinguishable from the overwhelming torrent of text which can’t have helped their conversion rates.

Most puzzling of all to me is why they chose to go with such a stale promoted trend: ‘Red Cross Join Us’. The most popular trends are always the ones that demand participation from Twitter users. For example, two popular trends in London today were ‘#thatswhyyourmyex’ [sic] and ‘#thingsthedevilinvented’. Both wouldn’t be mentioned by most Twitter users without adding some of their own thoughts. This is their viral quality.

As you can see in the chart above from trendistic.com, the Red Cross’ trend barely outperformed ‘#thingsthedevilinvented’ and woefully underperformed compared to ‘#thatswhyyourmyex’.

Even if the Red Cross got the promoted trend for free the data still suggests that they squandered an absolutely fantastic opportunity. Not many charities will have the cash to try to do right what the Red Cross did wrong but their failings can and should be learnt from and act as a stark reminder to charities that digital campaigns need to be more than just set and forget. These days our audiences demand interaction, vitality and originality. And so should we.

Update: After I posted this story up on Twitter I was contacted by a member of the American Red Cross' social media team who said that my points were 'well taken' but that they 'did [their] best with 1 hour's notice'.  As I suspected this means that it was a last minute campaign and that they were probably gifted some distress space by Twitter at short notice.  However, I think there are still some valuable lessons to be learnt including optimising trends for user engagement.