What does it look like when a regular person pays to promote a Tweet?

Anyone who works in social media will be intimately familiar with how Twitter’s paid campaigns work, but despite years of being around people in businesses running social media campaigns, I’ve never spent a single dollar of my business budget on a paid Twitter campaign (I’m all about ‘dem organic Tweets). So on a whim, I decided to give Twitter $50 to promote a single tweet that I thought was mildly clever/amusing in the hopes that it might get some traction:

https://twitter.com/jasondunn/status/1327642604696006658

There’s no CTA; I was looking to see if I’d get any comments/engagement on it – perhaps a new follower or ten? Here’s what my $50 got me:

So that’s a whole lot of…nothing really. One new follower. A few clicks on the hashtag. One organic reply, one reply from the paid promotion. The one paid promotion reply was a now-blocked troll posting a pornographic animated GIF that I can’t un-see. 😳 Twitter really can be a cesspool sometimes. 😩
I’m not sure what “success” looks like on a promoted Tweet – generally a 6.42% engagement rate with any form of paid advertising would be considered strong, but perhaps metrics of success are different on Twitter. If this were a pure brand ad, I might consider 9 cents per engagement to be a success.
$50 to get 8008 impressions works out to a CPM of $6.25. Given the completely un-targeted and generic nature of my tweet, I’d assume little to no competition for it in terms of other paid campaigns, so that does seem high to me. I’m sure an experienced ad buyer could have made the $50 go a bit further – I did everything on the default/automatic settings.

So what did I learn for my $50? That I should have used it for something else (like a few Blu-rays), though my curiosity has been satiated for now.

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