Social strategy

As long as I’m on the topic of web annoyances, let me remind you of promoted tweets. Those are the massively irrelevant ads-disguised-as-tweets that appear in your Twitter feed.

If you want to block them (meaning that the offending promoters’ content will never again darken your timeline) you have to go through a multi-click process. Yes, in the global scheme of things, clicking to rid yourself of pests is not onerous. But in social media terms, it’s a gigantic pain in the butt.

I do sometimes click on the tweets just to see the blowback they get from others also pissed off by the ads. That can be pretty amusing.

But I still wonder what the ROI is on these things, especially for the smaller businesses that think a few promoted tweets are going to take the place of real lead generation.

One example came into my feed yesterday:

It originated in October 2013. Do 23 retweets and 18 likes outweigh the hundreds of people who’ve blocked all of this company’s content for the past two and a half years?