Twitter on Wednesday published a post on its advertising blog claiming in part that “political Tweets drive donations,” based on the results of a study of tweets containing political content conducted by the company in conjunction with third-party market research firm Compete.
However, Twitter also hedges this claim, noting that the study actually found tweets drove views to political campaign donation pages, though not necessarily donations themselves. As Twitter’s director of political ad sales Peter Greenberger wrote in the company’s official blog post:
“Compete found the average Twitter user is 68% more likely to visit a campaign donation page than the average Internet user… Twitter users exposed to any of these kinds of political Tweets are almost twice as likely (97%) as other Twitter users to visit an online political donation page.”
If anything, the study conclusively proves that Twitter and/or Compete tracked user’s browser behavior outside of the website as well over multiple day periods. As Greenberger wrote:”During the study period, Compete discovered that Twitter users who saw a political Tweet across three to seven separate days were 31% more likely to donate than the average Twitter exposed user.”
