How Neil Got Elon Musk to Retweet Him
Neil Patel shares how he got Elon Musk to retweet him and what it actually did for his business. His social media ROAS analysis shows X at the top, but he breaks down why virality doesn't always mean revenue, and compares organic long-form versus short-form content strategies.
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You know what, we're going to start off today by talking about how Neil got a retweet by Elon Musk and it got like over 8 million impressions so far. We don't know what the results are going to be, probably for like, it's probably going to take some time to look at it. So Neil, you want to talk about this and what happened? Because Neil sent me a text yesterday, he's like, Neil Patel for the win.
And you know how I found out?
How?
Because someone sent me a text. That said Neil Patel for the win? Yeah. You think I'm on Twitter that often?
No, but give some context here.
Yeah, so we did an analysis on overall which social networks had the highest ROAS, return on ad spend, over the last 30 days. Now I did this study 30+ days ago, so that means roughly we looked at which social networks had the highest ROAS roughly 60 days ago, right? Just for context. And what we ended up finding out was that out of all the social networks, X had the highest ROAS. Now, just because someone has the highest ROAS, it doesn't mean that they're necessarily driving you the most revenue, right? Because Facebook can drive you more volume than let's say Twitter can or X can, just because they have way more users between Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, although people don't really run ads on WhatsApp. And what ended up happening is I ended up releasing this and I broke down how X had a ROAS over the last 30 days 30 days of 6.8, Pinterest 5.2, Snap 4.9, TikTok 4.1, YouTube 3.9, Instagram 3.3, Facebook 3.2, LinkedIn 2.6. Even though I'm sharing this data, it's based on a few things. First, it's based on, A, we manage quite a bit of client accounts at our ad agency, NP Digital, and of course they spend money on social media. And on top of that, we have access to over a million websites that we're looking at analytics in aggregate. Even though we have access to over a million sites, not everyone is running paid ads. And not everyone, even the people who are running paid ads, is running conversions through their analytics. So just because someone's running paid ads, it doesn't mean you can actually see the conversion rate. So your data sample starts shrinking from there. But either way, we have quite a bit of a decent-sized data size. And what we found was, When we looked at the total revenue from the numbers of how much, when people are advertising on social networks, what portion of the revenue is coming from each channel, we're looking at the major ones. Facebook drove 32.37% of the revenue. YouTube drove 28.19% of the revenue. LinkedIn was 11.47%. Instagram, 10.92%. TikTok, 8.44%. X was 4.41%. Snap was 3.18%. And Pinterest was 1.02%. But then when we broke down the revenue ROAS, which already went over, X was at top. There are other social networks. We excluded them from our analysis because when we're looking at the data, Reddit just wasn't driving enough volume. And there's a lot of other smaller social networks. There's also other popular social networks in places like China. Didn't have enough data to end up breaking them down into the study. So we based it off of what we had data off of. And Elon Musk, Roughly 30 days after I published it, ended up retweeting it, or not retweeting, he tweeted it based on someone else tweeting, hey, X has the highest ROAS.
Yeah, he reposted.
He reposted and he mentioned my ad agency NP Digital and the screenshot also mentioned my Twitter handle.
Yeah, so I'm curious to see how this goes in like the next month or so to see, like you look at your analytics, you look at your search console to see if it spiked or not, right? Like have you looked at it or not? It's probably too early because you're getting sampled too on your analytics.
No, not for NP Digital. For neilpatel.com.
Because NP Digital, did you look at it?
We looked at it. It didn't move the needle much. Then Elon Musk's mom also retweeted it. Oh.
We're like, yeah, she has a million followers.
She was supporting her son. What a good mom.
That's awesome.
Then in her retweet, it mentioned my corporate name, NP Digital. What skews the data is on— this is Saturday when we're recording this episode, okay?
One day after.
One day after. On Thursday, I sent out an email blast and I ended up linking to a page on NP Digital for something very specific. It was related to a webinar for a specific audience and only to the registration page. And even though it was only a sample set of our audience that got that email blast, so we didn't send it out to like a million people, it was a subset. That drove 3,383 visitors. So on a normal day, we drive 240 visitors. So to give you an idea, on Friday we had 1,048 visitors, but—
This is the NP Digital website.
This is the NP Digital website, but out of the 1,048, I bet you majority of them are still coming from the email blast.
It's probably true. So, hey, like, you'll probably— we'll probably come back to this just to see what happened.
But I think we— Well, when we looked at lead volume yesterday, because that's real time in our Salesforce.
Yeah.
Guess how many extra leads we got compared to a normal Friday?
The same.
Yeah, it was the same.
Yeah.
No difference.
Yeah. Here's the— I mean, talking about trends right now, you know, one interesting thing I'm seeing from the lead flow that we're getting at Single Grain is more and more people are looking for organic helps. It's organic YouTube or organic TikTok Shorts. That type of stuff, right? And I think it's more and more people like, they're still spending millions of dollars on paid. Like there's someone that reached out yesterday, they're spending millions a month on paid, but they want to start to diversify towards things like YouTube long-form and short-form. And those 2 things are very different things. Where I guess I'll start off with this one is for YouTube long-form, if you want to win, for example, we're kind of— this is considered long-form even though each episode is only 15 minutes right now.
Yeah.
But if you want to win, and this actually comes from our mutual friend Ali Abdaal, if you want to win, ultimately you just need to hook them in for the first 3 to 5 minutes and whatever it is that you talk about afterwards, the content will just work, right? If you can hold them there. And that's like one thing. But I will just say this, people that are trying to get into organic Shorts and long form right now, they're 2 completely different games, right? Like short form is like a slot machine. It's like the more you publish, the more chances you have to go viral.
Yes.
Like we had one that just got like 5 million views recently. And then it's like, but the other stuff, like what we're doing long form, it just takes forever to compound. It might take a year or 2 for us to get out of jail, but I'm already seeing it. Like we had a view, one video we published earlier this week on generative engine optimization that got 1,000 views on our 500-sub channel, which is a lot, relatively speaking.
That is a lot. Yeah. And what's funny is, is when you look at how many subscribers you have, especially on YouTube, it's really irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you have 2 million or 100,000. It really is irrelevant.
Yep. Yeah. So I think it comes down to how consistent are you for the long form? How consistent are you? And then also, also like how good is the content too? And obviously I think if we're going into 2024, we are in 2024. The thing I'm looking at is how do you increase the average view duration? Because when you look at, there's a channel called Colin and Samir, they do a lot of interviews with creators, right? Their average view duration is 43 minutes. On YouTube, it's usually about 20 minutes or so. So 43 minutes is a lot, right? So now I'm like, okay, how do I stretch my podcast interviews longer? This podcast used to be 5 minutes and we're now at 15 minutes now. I don't know if you— Neil, you for sure haven't seen this. I'll send Neil screenshots of like people commenting just so he knows we're moving in the right direction, right? But people are like, dude, I love— I'm loving the long-form format. I love this. You guys, clearly you guys know what you're talking about, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, this is good.
Dude, we know more than what we're just talking about. Look at our style. We both are wearing the same jacket too.
Neil copied me. I wore this first today, this morning. What time did you wake up at?
Well, I bought it over a year ago.
When did you buy yours?
He's just like, 2 weeks ago.
Subscribe to us on YouTube to see our fashion style. Yeah, there's something to be said about branding there.
Yeah, that's right. And funny enough, Eric and I actually have some of the same other outfits. We both like shopping at the same store, but, you know, neither of us like or care if we're wearing the same thing. But yes, when it comes to social media content, to get back on track, a lot of it is just hit or miss. And what a lot of people believe is, hey, you go viral, things are going to change for you. Not really. Virality may get you more views or followers, but when you look at what content pieces go viral and how much revenue it actually drives you, in most cases, virality has nothing to do with how much money you're making. And if you want to start producing content like MrBeast, that's great and all, but you need a lot of views to monetize. And he's doing an exceptionally amazing job, but if you look at the revenue per views, it's not that great. It doesn't mean he's doing a bad job. It just shows that if you want to go viral, you're not going to generate that much revenue for a lot of views. But on the flip side, when I create content around B2B, I know for a fact it's never going to get as many views, but when we look at leads, we generate way more leads. For example, similarly how Elon Musk ended up tweeting out and mentioning my corporation and it had how many views?
About 8 million from what I saw yesterday.
8 million views. That's a lot of views. On the flip side, right? And I'm actually looking up right now, 14.1 million views. That's a lot of views. On the flip side, my Instagram post and my tweet about the top 5 digital marketing trends for 2024 didn't even get more than, call it, a million views. It actually wasn't even that much. I can actually go see it on Twitter. On Twitter it got, where was it? Top 5 digital marketing trends. Dude, I have to actually go back. Let's see, AI. And I'm bringing this one up for a reason.
As Neil pulls it up too. Well, are you close to it?
No.
Okay. Well, Neil, as Neil pulls it up, I will say this. Neil's been consistent with his Twitter or X experiment, and a lot of these are hit or miss, relatively speaking. Right. But then every once in a while, most of his are like 20,000, 30,000 views. Some of them have like 500,000 views, a million views or whatever.
Yes.
But the quality per view is much higher is what you're trying to say, right?
Yes. And dude, when I look at the— okay, top 5 digital marketing trends of 2024, it got 82,000 views on Twitter. And you know what's funny? I know we got 2 leads from that post.
Yeah.
One from Twitter, one from Instagram. And the reason I know that is the person on Twitter ended up saying that they found it on Twitter, they loved it, and they want to work with us. Instagram, I actually got the DM. I got the DM or the comment on Instagram that turned into a DM. And then I started talking to the guy back and forth. The one on Instagram was not a qualified lead. We won't turn that into a customer. Twitter, time will tell, but it has a fraction of the views, yet I actually got a qualified lead. The point I'm making is going viral isn't a big deal unless it's going to drive you revenue. And in most cases, it doesn't drive more revenue.
And actually, similarly to that, so one thing is, I mean, with MrBeast, like, we love what he's doing. I tune in every time he launches a new video. But at the end of the day, what he's doing, like, he's spending millions of dollars per video, and it's a spectacle each time. And it takes a lot of time and effort too. 99% of us aren't going to do that. Like, you're better off just— it's okay to niche down. It's okay to talk about what you know. As long as you're continually learning, you're going to have some interesting things to say. And if you're doing as well, you're going to have interesting things to say. What I'll say about X is similarly, we had a post where I put up and maybe it got like, I don't know, 30,000 or 40,000 views. And relatively speaking, that's decent for my—
That's a lot of views.
For my— yeah, for my channel.
For anyone, most people's accounts, especially considering it's B2B.
Yeah. So like, you know, I only— I think what, I have 34,000 followers or something, but that one actually led to 2 leads and then one of them signed for a— it was a 6-figure contract. Right. And so and then they were ready to go. It's like, oh, we really need this. Right. And then I was like, okay, go talk to the sales team. So anyway, anything else to add before we get out of here?
Oh, one last thing. My Instagram post that created the lead wasn't qualified, had 394,000 views while my Twitter post, which I already mentioned, had 82,000 views. Just shows views aren't everything.
Yep. It's the quality of views. And actually, someone said this recently. It's like, it doesn't matter. Like, if you have 1,000 of the richest people or smartest people in the world following you versus like 10 billion of the— like, there's not 10 billion, 1 billion people, right? I'd rather go for like the 1,000.
So, dude, but that's so funny. When people talk about social media, they're like, would you rather have $1 million or 1 million followers? Most people rather have the million followers and they're like, I want follower count. I always tell people, I'm like, I'd rather take the cash.
Yeah.
Because then if you just put in the S&P and if you You get your 9% returns and let that compound, you're better off than the million followers.
Okay, so here's a question for you. Would you rather take a million bucks or 1,000 of the richest, smartest people in the world following you on Twitter?
1,000 richest, smartest people following you.
It's a little different. See, it depends on the quality.
Yeah, it depends on the quality. But most people say, do you want a million followers or a million dollars? I would take the million dollars almost every single time. Anyone who says otherwise, most people will not know how to monetize those million followers and they'll generate little to no revenue from it.
Yep. Yeah, also, so it also ties in with like the level that you're at as well, right? And the knowledge that you know. Otherwise, you're not going to know what to do with the 1,000 richest or smartest people too. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe. If you wanna see what Neil and I are wearing, then go to YouTube. Make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube. And that being said, go check out the next video over here, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
