Twitter's Instant Unlock Cards: Increasing Advertisers' Conversion By Incentivizing Users

Interaction and engagement are everything on the web. People on the web offering services and others have gone to great length to get those two, and that includes Twitter. On August 4th, 2016, the social media goes forward by introducing Instant Unlock Cards. They are ads that "need to be unlocked" first.

One measurement of a successful internet campaign is when a targeted audience is interacting with a brand. Twitter has managed to leverage interaction using Promoted Tweet Carousel in early 2016 before introducing conversational ads. Unlock Cards is just another way for Twitter to encourage people to tweet.

So this is how it works:

Usual ads on Twitter contain compelling images or videos that have their own call-to-action buttons with customizable hashtags. Instant Unlock Cards have similar, but they have to be tweeted first in order for users to get its exclusive contents. So for example a film's trailer can only be viewed after the Card have been retweeted.

This is somehow similar to Facebook's "share to see more".

The method that encourages engagement, gives brands the ability to expand its reach in a more powerful manner. During its beta release, brands saw an average of 34 percent earned media rate. What this means is that advertisers receives 34 earned engagement for every 100 paid impressions.

A Legitimate Clickbait?

Brands advertise to spread their words out. Advertisements on social media networks come in many form, and all of them exist for a single purpose: engagement. And that engagement will translate to conversion.

Asking users to click before giving them the reward resembles clickbait strategy. This is by having a compelling headline that drives curiosity. But the difference here is that ordinary users and brands are two separate beings. While users who post things for free may have no strings attached, brands do. So it doesn't necessarily means Unlock Cards are clickbaits, although they could.

Clickbaits as we know them, trick users to click. They tend to lie and deceive after they're engaged. Unlock Cards shouldn't be such a thing because they represent the brand that is posting it.

So the main issue about Unlock Cards isn't clickbait.

The bigger problem concerning the method is its ability to please and deliver expectation. For example, users that retweeted an Unlock Card are expecting a great trailer found nowhere else on the web. But what they're given is a trailer they've seen a hundred times before.

Unlock Cards is kind of a way for Twitter to legitimate clickbait in the form of ads. While those Cards should indeed deliver expectation because they are ads, the possibilities for doing otherwise are still there. The method is a great strategy, but to users that are familiar with clickbaits and have plenty of unpleasant experience concerning this may think twice before engaging them.