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.”

Listen to the episode above, and you can subscribe to the show anywhere you typically get your podcasts. To make it easy for you, we’ve also got our usual places linked: Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and our RSS feed.