Did you know that Twitter offers paid options to get your product/service/offer seen by your target Twitter audience?

It’s called Twitter Ads – you can create different campaigns types, each having difference goals, audience and budgets. So how do you get started? Firstly determine your advertising goals on Twitter Ads – do you want to gain follows, increase website traffic, increase engagement or another goal option. Once you’ve decided on this sign into your normal Twitter account, then, in a new browser tab go to https://ads.twitter.com/ and sign in there and add your payment details. You’re then ready to create your first Twitter Ads campaign.

STEP 1 Choose your campaign type

Under the ‘New Campaign’ button select the campaign type that best matches your advertising goals. Then the audience features available to you will depend on the campaign type selected – the focus will be on scheduled tweets or promoted accounts. Twitter helps guide you through this. The most popular campaign types are ‘Followers’ ‘Website clicks or conversions’ or ‘Tweet engagement’.

‘Followers’ is focused on gaining followers and focuses on promoting your Twitter account as a whole in home timelines, who to Follow and search results.

‘Website conversions’ designed to drive traffic to a specific page on your website – which can be tracked with a snippet of ‘conversion’ code placed on the selected ‘landing page’. With this option you only pay if someone clicks through to your web page from the url link contained in the promoted tweet.

‘Tweet engagement’ is used to increase retweets, likes, profile views and general engagement with the promoted tweet. This option you pay for every form of engagement.

For the purposes of this article I’ll focus on a ‘Website Links or Conversions’ campaign. Give your campaign a name and decide on the duration for your campaign – i.e.. continuously or set start/end dates. 

STEP 2 Define your audience

Twitter offers a variety of granular options for this depending on the campaign type you’ve opted for, some may be more useful than others – the more you specify the smaller the audience reach but obviously the more targeted it should be. Here’s a quick rundown the most popular options:

1. Add Followers

This allows you to add in any potential competitors or influencers on Twitter whose followers may be interested in your product/service/offer and show your tweet to them. This is a very powerful feature and should not be under estimated and it’s important to do your research when using this.

2. Add Interests

This allows you to add in key ‘interests’ from a list determined by Twitter. You can also add in TV shows, networks and genres that your followers might be watching and tweeting about.

3. Add keywords

Reach people that search or tweet about specific keywords. You can choose to have your tweets appear in either users’ timelines or in search results. Twitter allows you to specify a variety of search term types from hashtags to broad, phrase and exact match search terms (like Google Adwords). Twitter will also suggest additional keywords or keyword variations.

4. Location

You can target by geographical location if your product/service/offer is geographically restrictive. This can be by country, county or possibly the most helpful – by postcodes. If you want do add postcodes sadly there’s no quick bulk upload .csv function and they have to be entered manually or from a text file containing one postcode per line which you can then copy/paste in.

5. Tailored Audience

This gives you the option to target your actual website visitors or lists from your database. This option can be somewhat complicated so it’s best to read up on this on Twitter Ads website before adding this option.

5. Gender & devices

Finally you can also target Individual genders and even devices and platforms.

STEP 3 Budget

Start small and then once you’ve tested the market you can always raise this. Some clients start with as little as £5 per day and see great results. Other budgetary options may be available here depending on your campaign type selected. You’ll also have the opportunity to decide on your cost per ‘engagement’ whether it’s automatically determined or set as a target cost.

STEP 4 Create your tweet

It’s best to have at least 3 promoted tweets per campaign. I always recommend creating a unique tweet for this rather than using one of your existing tweets as it allows you to then specifically see its influence as a promoted tweet. Take advantage of incorporating an optional ‘website card’ at the end of the tweet – this offers extra image and text content to your Tweet that you’d otherwise not be able to display in a standard tweet.

Once you’ve created your ads the campaign is ready to launch, just save, and it’s done. Keep checking your campaign and remember you can start and pause your promoted tweets campaigns when you want to so you always have complete control and change your ads during the campaign to keep it fresh and appealing

Hopefully this has shed some light on Twitter Ads and the benefits it can have to get your product/service/offer in front of your key audiences. You can read more at https://business.twitter.com/basics

 

If you need any help with Twitter Ad campaigns or want to know more about how social media can help your business get in touch with me at http://paulkirkdesign.co.uk or at @PKirk_designer