Social media platforms offer brands a great medium to communicate their message to their audience. They also offer various promotion opportunities that brands can leverage for their marketing efforts. In the 3rd quarter of 2014, Facebook gained almost $2.96 billion from advertising, while Twitter increased its advertising revenue to $320 million. With nearly 80% of US marketers using promoted Tweets, it’s no wonder Twitter’s advertising revenue is gradually increasing each quarter. It’s also worth knowing that marketers assigned nearly 60% of their digital marketing budget to social media advertising in 2014, this number being expected to increase even more in 2015.
With that in mind, we decided to gather all the information you need to know about Twitter advertising. Whether you want to start investing in Twitter ads or just want to find out more about it, here’s our complete 5 step guide to becoming a Twitter advertising pro.
Twitter Ad Types
There are three types of ads you can choose from to promote on Twitter:
- Promoted Accounts: helps you attract more of the right followers to your brand. Increasing your Twitter follower base will help you get the most out of your social media marketing strategy. The more followers you have, the more people will see your tweets. Keep in mind that quality is much more important than quantity. It’s better to promote your message to a fewer, but a much more targeted audience, then sending it to a bigger one, that doesn’t relate to your brand. An active Twitter account, with people commenting and engaging with your brand also increases your credibility and authority. People who see others engage with a specific brand are much more likely to follow and prompt conversations.
- Promoted Tweets: use this feature to target the timelines of Twitter users with a specific message. This is particularly useful when you want to get more exposure for a tweet about a specific product, service, event or marketing campaign you are currently promoting.
- Promoted Trends: interested in promoting a particular trending topic and put your story at the top of that list for 24 hours? Twitter can help you with this! It’s a great way to get your name to a lot of Twitter users and develop a viral online campaign. If you want to try out this option, you should know that it’s quite costly and you might need to contact Twitter directly to get started.
Starting a new ad campaign
Now that we’ve covered the type of ads you can use, it’s time we made you a real advertising pro. Here’s our complete 5 step guide to start advertising successfully on Twitter.
Step 1. Select the campaign objectives
The first step in setting up an ad campaign is deciding on an objective or goal. Analyse where you are and what you want to reach. Your ads will be your ticket for the journey. Twitter recommends you specific list of objectives to choose from, but also allows you to create a custom one.
Step 2. Set up the campaign name and duration
After deciding your ad goal, you will need to choose a name for the campaign together with the start and end dates. You can either start immediately and run continuously or select a future start date. Choosing the duration of the ad campaign goes hand in hand with your assigned budget and your marketing campaign timeline. It is your choice whether to complete the budget quickly or pace the spend over a longer period of time.
Step 3. Creative
When creating the ads you can choose from your existing tweets or build a new, custom tweet for better match the campaign messaging. Write engaging copy that describes the benefits that the audience will get if they follow your brand, buy your products or attend your event. Also, add powerful images that go hand in hand with your message. Tip: uploading an image to an ad will reduce the available text space by 20-25 characters, so be sure you consider that when composing a new ad.
Step 4. Targeting
Finished the creative? You’re almost there. You first need to target your audience so you can make sure your message reaches the right people. The audience can be targeted by location, gender, language, device or platform. You can also set up a tailored audience, such as import contacts from your email database or from your CRM. If the products or services you are selling have multiple types of audience, our recommendation is to build up separate campaigns for the respective targeting options.
Step 5. Budgeting
You can set a daily maximum budget, as well as total campaign budgets. Twitter stops showing your ads once the budget is finished, so you don’t have to worry about being charged extra. Twitter charges for Cost-Per-Engagement, so you will only pay when the user takes a specific action, such as retweets, replies or favourites the promoted tweet.
Also, make sure to check whether you want your ads to appear standard (show ads throughout the day) or accelerated (show ads as often as possible starting at midnight).
Twitter Cards
Twitter Advertising is great, but there’s more to it then promoted tweets, accounts or trends. Twitter ads also offers you the possibility to promote cards, a customisable Twitter experience that can offer access to a rich media experience that goes beyond the 140-characters. It’s the cherry on the cake.
Twitter Cards can help you ask your audience do things like:
- Sign up for an email list
- Visit a website
- Check out a landing page
- Download an app
The great thing about Twitter Cards is that your brand can get increased exposure. Other added benefits refers to: a consistent look for the posts across platforms, more traffic to your website and more people following you, customised titles and description for photo and URL and a fantastic mobile experience for the audience.
The Lead Generation Cards are one of the most exciting ad tools from Twitter for marketers who look to build or extend their email database. With Lead Generation Cards users can provide their name and email address to a brand for future marketing promotions. The cards can be used with offers, newsletter subscriptions, contents or app downloads.
Track your results
Congrats! You just launched your first ad campaign on Twitter. Track the results of the promoted campaigns and check the daily spend on each campaign. Make the necessary adjustments to get the most out of your Twitter advertising efforts. Analysing ad results will help you optimise your campaigns on-the-go and A/B test the messages and visual content.
Have you tried promoted tweets or Twitter Cards? I’d love to hear about your experiences with Twitter advertising.
