If you’ve read anything about ecommerce, you’ll have noticed that entrepreneurs put a lot of effort into Facebook marketing. And, while Facebook ads can be profitable, they’re also expensive and challenging to get right.
So what’s an alternative?
With over 330 million monthly active users – and 145 million daily active users – Twitter is a huge social media platform. The micro-blogging website allows people to curate their newsfeed by following accounts of people or organizations that specifically interest them. The result is passionate and engaged communities.
Ecommerce entrepreneurs usually consider Twitter a way to gain an organic following, interact with customers, or do market research. And while it is excellent for those things, with a little creative thinking, it could also be a fantastic marketing tool.
Over the last few months, we’ve noticed entrepreneurs are finding interesting ways to harness Twitter’s power to market their products. Kamil Sattar and his business partner Jasmine are two such entrepreneurs. They made over $22,000 in sales of their Valentine’s Day product using Twitter alone. Eager to hear more, I recently spoke with Kamil to learn all about it.
From School Dropout to Entrepreneur
Kamil Sattar may be a self-made entrepreneur and YouTuber these days, but just five years ago, he was a high school dropout with no grades and an uncertain future.
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After realizing he was never going to perform well in school, Kamil left. He worked and started working clothing stores to make ends meet. Kamil wasn’t academically gifted – and had the added difficulty of being dyslexic – but he knew he still had a choice for his future.
“I thought the only thing I can do is either get a low-paid job and do that for the rest of my life, or I can try and start a business and make some good money.”
At first, he was buying and reselling luxury, high-end shoes. Then, in 2016 he found out about dropshipping and went all in. He struggled for the first eight months, but eventually, he made around £25,000 selling phone privacy protectors.
By mid-2018, Kamil had developed a robust skillset, and he’d also started working with partners, managing to generate over a million in revenue. Working with partners suited Kamil. Not only did it mean the pair could share the responsibility of running a store, but they also benefited from knowledge sharing. And this is how he discovered the power of using Twitter.
Collaborating on A New Store and Planning Opportunities
In late-2019, Kamil, along with his business partner Jasmine Togba, started working on a new store selling various products that were perfect for gifts.
Jasmine began in ecommerce after working with brands as a micro-influencer. After realizing she could cut out the middleman and create her own store, she’d educated herself on everything business and marketing.
Coming into December and January, Kamil and Jasmine knew they needed to start thinking about promoting a Valentine’s Day gift. They already had a great product – a customizable and unique lamp – they just needed to find the best way to market it.
While Kamil had put in hours learning everything about Facebook ads, Jasmine knew all about Twitter. And, figuring that it would be much cheaper than either Facebook ads, they decided to see what Twitter could do for their product.
Finding Twitter Influencers and Implementing a Strategy
With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, Kamil and Jasmine wanted to target couples in their marketing. They figured their customizable lamp would be an excellent gift for someone to give to their loved ones. They quickly went about finding Twitter accounts and influencers in the relationship niche that they could partner with.
Soon they found an account that specifically catered to Black couples was open to working with businesses and boasted a very engaged community of over 170,000 followers. Knowing this was a great opportunity, they reached out to the account and arranged for them to feature their products.
However, Kamil knew they needed their ad to be more subtle than just a one-off Tweet with a link to their store.
“The key to Twitter success is not to come across salesy. [Instead, you want] to come across like you’re just having some fun, you’re having a bit of a laugh. And then in the thread, you ask [the influencer] to put the link there.”
They got the account to make the first tweet an enticing product photo with a good caption – a hook to entice people. In this case, it was a side-by-side image of a couple and a customized lamp based on their photo. Using the same thread, they would post a follow-up tweet that would link directly to Kamil and Jasmine’s store. Sometimes there would even be a third tweet of a product video, showing potential customers the product from all angles.
Creating a thread of two or three tweets meant that if a viewer were curious enough to click on the first tweet, the next two would automatically show up below.
And that first post, with its great image and heartfelt caption, made a big splash.
A Simple Approach but Huge Results
The first tweet ended up with well over 14,000 likes and 2,000 retweets. The result was a massive audience being shown Kamil and Jasmine’s product.
The likes and retweets on the follow-up tweet, which had the link to the store, were much lower. However, that wasn’t the goal for this tweet. Instead, this tweet’s success was measured by the website traffic and sales generated.
As you can see from the store’s Shopify dashboard, the Twitter influencer campaign was a success.
Twitter helped the two earn over $18,000 in January 2020 and $22,740 during Q1 of 2020. What’s more, unlike Facebook ads, this campaign’s cost was incredibly low, meaning more profit for Kamil and Jasmine.
“Twitter influence is actually really cheap, as well. They only charge us like $20-50. So the return on investment was crazy.”
With such a fantastic consumer response, Kamil and Jasmine knew they were onto a good thing. They repeated their tactic for other markets, such as finding Twitter accounts that catered towards caucasian couples. They also paid for posts around other events and holidays, such as this post for Mother’s Day, which received over 20,000 likes
An Alternative for Small Budgets or New Stores
With so many ecommerce entrepreneurs getting fantastic results on Facebook, it can be easy to forget about other opportunities. While Twitter doesn’t have the user numbers of Facebook, it does boast passionate communities. And there’s potential to go viral on Twitter in a way that’s difficult to do on Facebook. And, influencer marketing is much easier to master than Facebook ads.
For those with a small ads budget or a new Facebook pixel, utilizing Twitter influencers can be an excellent starting point. Twitter influencers can be much cheaper than Instagram influencers but can still reach a massive audience, which warms up your pixel and earns you sales on a small investment.
Using Twitter influencers isn’t an area with a lot of step-by-step guides. But, if you’re willing to do the hard work of searching for accounts with engaged audiences, your efforts can be quickly rewarded.
After all, seeing $22,000 of sales from any campaign is an enviable result.