Did the Post's Election Twitter Experiment Work?

[Commentary] On election night, the Washington Post bought one of Twitter's "promoted trends." When users clicked the trend, #Election, Post content got top billing. It marked the first time that a media company had purchased a promoted trend to promote their own material, and I thought it was a really interesting move. The question that many news organizations have been wondering since then is, "So, did it work?"

According to the Post's executive producer and head of digital news products Katharine Zaleski, the answer is yes, even though it didn't drive huge amounts of traffic to the paper's site. "The reason we did it was not so much for the traffic. It was more to be front and center in the conversation," she said. Of all the people who clicked on the Election link from the Twitter.com homepage, 9% of them engaged with the Washington Post. That is to say, they clicked on a link, retweeted something, or followed the Post's Twitter feed. It's the first time that a media company's done this sort of thing, so we don't have a good comparison, but Twitter's Chloe Sladden said that the 9% engagement was on the "high-average" for other types of promoted trends like today's "McRib is back." "It was an experiment," Zaleski averred. "I'm really happy about it." I think she should be, even if buying a Twitter promoted trend didn't crash the Washington Post servers. It shows that the Post is willing to take social media seriously as the means by which news is transmitted now.