Choosing The Right Twitter Ad Campaign

Each social platform has its own purpose, which means you can’t have the same tactics for all of them. Posting a few times per day on Twitter is recommended, but it is not necessary for Facebook or Linkedin. It’s same when it comes to Social media advertising. If you now how to create ads on AdWords you will know how to create it on any other social media. Technic is similar, but a strategy should be different.

This article I will devote to Twitter ad campaigns and some other will be about another Social platform. Here you will find essential tips for Twitter ads strategy and my personal research on this theme.

I like Twitter because it is an open community compared to Facebook. Just by using right hashtags your tweets can acquire a lot of free impressions, likes or comments. It has a few different options when it comes to paid tweets. According to my research and few other blogs I would suggest you to use all of them, but in a different stage and for a different purpose.

Increase The Number of Followers Using Ads

If you have a new Twitter account or want to increase the number of followers, you should start with the first ad type – followers. With this option, you will grow the number of specified and targeted followers. Your ad will appear to all Twitter user you specify on the left-hand side of desktop and within the timeline on both mobile and desktop. Twitter gives you two options: to create a new tweet or choose existing. Tweet you use to attract new followers should explain your users whey they should follow you, and include “follow us” button. Avoid extra links or photos that could distract them from the follow button.

Drive Traffic to Your Website

This type of ad is good if you plan to drive traffic to your website or if you plan to get people to take a specific action. Before creating the ad, it is important to set up goal conversions using tags that you can use for the ad later. These tags are embedded code snippets that are triggered when a user takes an action on your website after viewing or engaging with promoted content on Twitter. To create conversion tags go to tools menu under the ads.twitter.com and choose conversion tracking. Select one of the conversion types that could be:

  • Site visit: User visits a landing page on your site
  • Purchase: User completes a purchase of a product or service on your site
  • Download: User downloads a file, such as a white paper or software package, from your site
  • Sign up: User signs up for your service, newsletter, or email communication
  • Custom: This is a catch-all category for a custom action that does not fall into one of the categories above.

Under the conversion type option, you will see Post-engagement attribution window that could be used for conversions tracking that happen after a person engages with your ads. User engaging with your ads can include favorites, retweets, follows, replies or URL clicks on your promoted tweet. There is also post-view attribution option that tracks conversions that happen after a person views (but does not engage with) your ads.

twitter engagement

After creating the tag, you need to copy and paste tag code into your site. The code snippet should be pasted just before the closing HTML </body> tag of your web page. To check that your website tag is set up correctly, return to the conversion tracking page in your Twitter Ads account after a few hours to see that the status for your website tag has changed from “unverified” to “tracking”.

Engage Your Twitter Followers

This type of ad will help you to get more people engaging with a particular tweet. You will be charged when someone retweets, favorites, replies to or click on your tweet. The best tip I can give you here is to use an image in your tweet because that is the good way to stand out in the crowd. I suggest you to use images in .png format and size should be 880×440 pixels. Besides images write something interesting and engaging. Count that Twitter allows yours 140 characters per tweet and image takes 23 characters for URL that is automatically created. Call to action and questions could be effective ways to engage followers. Your promoted tweet should have engagement rate at least 1-3% per promoted tweets. If you ads hitting lower rate you should end that campaign or replace with other tweets.

Twitter promoted tweet

Increase The Number of App Users

I wrote an article where you can in detail read about how can Twitter drive user growth and app engagement. Here I will give you just a few hints. This type of ad the best goes along with Twitter cards. App promotion helps you to drive installs of their mobile app and re-engage existing users. With this ad, you can drive users to download or open mobile apps directly within a Tweet. Combined with right targeting options these ads are designed to empower your app in the mobile marketplace.

Twitter Can Help You to Generate Leads

Leads on Twitter go with Twitter cards, same as the app engagement ads. In this campaign, you pay when someone shares their email with you. In other words, you pay for each email address you receive. Lead generation cards allow you to collect contact details from your users, directly from Twitter. You can include an image and call to action of your choice. You can download your leads from the Cards creative manager. Your leads are compiled per card and are available in CSV format.

lead-generation

 Start With Twitter Advertising

Once you become familiar with Twitter ad types it is time to promote your tweets. First you have to do is to pick a campaign type, then enter some basic details. Give a name to your campaign, define when it will start and setup your time zone.

Be Creative With Your Ads

You have two options: to create a new tweet or to promote existing one. Be authentic and share positivity. Be passionate, exciting and friendly. Share something valuable for your followers. Mix brand values and humor in order to increase engagement. Spend some time to craft your tweets, and test different approaches.

Use Targeting Option Carefully

Twitter gives you a wide range of options when it comes to targeting. From locations, gender, language and devices to Twitter-specialized targeting options.

First additional targeting criteria is a keyword-based targeting. With this option, you will target on people who tweet, search or engage with chosen keyword phrases. You can choose different matching to be utilized.

  • Broad match – Matches on tweets containing keywords in any order, including other words in between. It also includes related terms, synonyms, misspellings and slang.  Example: love sweets will match to Tweets such as “I love sweets” and “I adore dark chocolate”.
  • Phrase match – Matches on tweets containing keywords in exact order only.
  • Negative unordered match – Tweets containing the negative keyword in any order.
  • Negative phrase match – Tweets containing the negative keyword in exact order.

Suggestion is to include at least one of targeted keywords you used within your tweets. As you already know keywords could be more than one word. Choose keywords that have different global daily volume. This is a great option that shows you how many tweets containing each keyword on a daily basis. You can also apply those keywords in your free tweets.

Twitter ad

After you finish with keywords, choose interests and followers you will focus on. Here you can choose the audience based on their interests. For example: Food and drink – Coffee and tea, Business – Marketing. If you know usernames of followers you want to focus on you can easily add their usernames. Tailored audience is a useful tool for creating tailored follower lists and it could be set upped under the tool – audience manager option. Television targeting is available only for UK and it is focused on people that watch television.

Depends on your business you can choose which type of ad suits you the best, but anyway you should test it all. Before you start the campaign it is important to define your goals and spend some time to craft catchy content.