Paying to promote your tweets won’t do much for your personal brand

Why do people pay to promote their tweets? Is the whole promoted tweet marketplace a scam, or can a promoted tweet make you famous and popular online? This week on Why’d You Push That Button?, Kaitlyn Tiffany and I try to find answers. Well, really, Kaitlyn goes on a journey into the depths of promoted tweets and then reports back what she’s learned.

In this episode, we chat with a chronicler of promoted tweets — the man behind the Promoted Tweets Twitter account — as well as an influencer who has used promoted tweets to boost his own brand. We won’t spoil how that went. Kaitlyn then takes a minute to promote her own tweet and gives us the results of that $50 investment. Then, The Verge’s engagement editor Ruben Salvadori steps in to offer some advice. Finally, we chat with Patrick Abron, co-founder of BrandYourself.com, about self-promotion and the intricacies and nastiness of “personal brand management.”