In addition to being a great platform for customer service, where customers can reach out and connect directly with brands, Twitter also offers a variety of ways to reach your customers directly through advertising. Here we’ll walk you through best practices and how to use Twitter advertising.
About Twitter
Unlike other mega social media channels (*cough, Facebook, cough*), Twitter’s news-feed is still mostly made up of real-time, organic content. At this time, the Twitter homepage is made up of organic content from (mostly) people and brands you follow, sorted in chronological order of when it was posted. Twitter allows brands to build an online persona and engage with people in a more personal and conversational manner. The conversational aspect of Twitter allows the channel to be a leader for customer service, where brands can calm down frustrated customers in a public space while awarding brand advocates for touting a brand’s account to their followers.
The reason I refer to Twitter as “mostly” organic content is because there are a few minor non-invasive advertising options brands can take into account to be in front of more customers’ eyes. This offers a way to talk to your customers (or potential customers) on a consistent basis instead of solely being spoken about.
Twitter Advertising Campaign: Objective
In the past few weeks, Twitter has rolled out setting up campaigns by objective. The big win here for advertisers is we only pay when the objective we set for the campaign takes place. When creating a campaign, Twitter gives the following objective options:
- Followers – increase the amount of Twitter followers of your account
- Website clicks or conversions – send clicks to a landing page and/or use a conversion pixel to send people to your website to take a specific action
- Tweet Engagements – replies, retweets, image clicks, favorites, and any other way someone can engage with a tweet
- App installs or engagements – get people to download or interact with your mobile app
- Leads on Twitter – collect email addresses to build a target audience, add to your existing email list, etc.
Twitter Advertising Campaign: Creative
After selecting your objective, you’ll be asked to name and choose a timeline for your campaign. The next big step is selecting creative. You have the options to select existing Tweets or compose brand new Tweets to use in your campaign. I recommend using new Tweets specifically for your campaign, even if that means slightly re-purposing past successful tweets. Using new Tweets helps with reporting, and allows you to eliminate any under performers from showing up on your profile. At minimum, compose three Tweets for Twitter to optimize the best performing Tweet. Depending on your objective, you may want to add a photo or link to outside content to help meet your benchmarks.
Twitter Advertising Campaign: Targeting
Now that you’ve set up your lovely creative and know when you’re going to reach your audience, it’s time to decide how you’re going to target them. First you’ll have to choose from the two primary methods of targeting: interest and followers or tailored audiences. Unless you have a customized audience, such as your email database, you will choose “interests and followers.”
After choosing interests and followers, you can add usernames to target people who have similar interests to followers of any of those accounts. For example, if you’re targeting people who may be interested in a culinary tour of New Orleans, you would want to target some of New Orleans’ most iconic and trending restaurants. You should choose anywhere from 15 – 25 handles to target. If you’re unsure about what handles to target, Twitter has a tool to help.
Additional targeting options you can implement based on your intended audience are interest categories, gender, languages and locations. Twitter also allows you to exclude certain audience lists as well: for instance, if you do not want to target individuals already on your email or phone list, you can upload those contacts.
Twitter Advertising Campaign: Budget
There are three levels of budget options in each Twitter campaign. First, a daily maximum is required. This tells Twitter how much money your campaign can spend in one day.
The next is maximum bid per objective. Depending on the objective you chose, this tells Twitter the most you are willing to pay per each of those conversion – for instance, how much you are willing to pay per each new follower.
The final element is setting a total budget. This is an optional feature, but I highly encourage it.
Twitter Advertising Campaign: Optimize
Ta-da! You have your Twitter campaign all set and ready to go. Don’t stop there though. It’s important to consistently check in on your campaign and optimize accordingly. Depending on its performance, perhaps you’ll try new creative, change your targeting and/or increase your bid.
Follow me (@MignonMay) and FSC Interactive (@FSCInteractive) on Twitter for more social trends, advice and updates!