in: Twitter
by: Katie Hellmuth Martin
If you're thinking of using Twitter's Promoted Tweets, then you're making a good move. In fact, playing with Twitter's interface and engaging in strategies for advertising campaigns may bring you so much joy, that you may actually grow frustrated with Facebook's advertising model, and notice them moving their clunky advertising tool to operate more like Twitter. Here's the bottom line: with Twitter Ads, you can reach a lot of the right kind of people, very quickly, for a low price. And it's easy to navigate. Here are six tips you can use as you start your Promoted Tweet ad campaigns.
PLAY
Dive into Twitter's Promoted Tweets by going to ads.twitter.com, plugging in your credit card (don't worry, you can put spending limits on your campaign right away), and start getting familiar with how it all works. Create a promoted ad. Go ahead - get it wrong the first time, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that you begin to get fluid and clear on how people are engaging - or not engaging - with your tweets. You now have access to behind the scenes activities on your tweets, like which links were clicked on, what types of users clicked on ads, and snapshot pictures of when you gained and lost followers.
GO MICRO
Once you get familiar with how Twitter Ads work, you will plan what you want to tweet. Key to each tweet is:
- the message in the tweet
- who is seeing the tweet
Even though you want clicks and sales from Twitter, you may also just get impressions, meaning people are looking at the promoted tweet, taking it in, putting away their impression of your message in the back of their mind, and moving on. You will want your message to be very specific, like highlighting a new blog post, showcasing new press (and only targeting followers of the people who follow the Twitter handle of that press or blog outlet and others like it).
TARGET YOUR COMPETITION
Yes, you can target your competition with Twitter ads, and no they won't find out that you are doing it. There are several ways to target a single tweet, which include:
- selecting an interest
- selecting a geographic area
- selecting male or female
- selecting different user handles, aka Twitter names
Targeting Twitter handles is a great way to target different types of people. For example: if you run a local blog, you may want to target the followers of the local magazines, newspapers and TV stations in your area. You can create a campaign that only shows the tweet of your choice to that group of people. It's a great way to help a new Twitter account get seen by people who may want to know about it!
TAKE THAT CALL FROM A TWITTER SUPPORT PERSON
If a person from Twitter emails you, asking to set up a meeting with you to go over your Twitter campaign, do it! Your days are busy and you don't have time for one more meeting, especially with a potential sales person. But this is a Twitter support person who wants to give you tips. Unlike the other major click-based ad programs out there, Twitter started with a support system in place. Take advantage of this call because your Twitter support person will have insight into your campaign based on all of the other campaigns he or she sees on a daily basis.
SET A LOW BUDGET
Advertising on Twitter can be very affordable. You pay per engagement, meaning, you pay for if someone clicks on or follows or RTs your promoted tweet. Twitter goes into detail about how if other people are clicking on the ad based on someone else's engagement with it, then you don't get charged. Be sure to read Twitter's guidelines to understand how the charging works, but know this: you can set a daily limit of how much you want to pay per day, or in total for a certain campaign, and you can set your bid per engagement. For example, you can set a daily budget of $10 for an ad campaign to run forever, or you can put a date on it to run out three days from now. And you can bid $.50 or $3.00 or any amount per engagement. It's up to your budget, but the higher the bid, the more people it reaches.
USE PICTURES, AND NO PICTURES
Don't forget that you can get visual in Twitter and post a picture. In your analytics, you'll be able to get a sense of tweets with pictures or without pictures are working better for you. Or what kinds of pictures are getting more traction for your brand. The nice thing about using Twitter's advertising platform is that you can publish native tweets from it, and schedule them. You can publish regular (free or "organic") tweets as well as tweets you pay to promote. Plus, when you are adding a picture to a native, regular tweet, that photo gets added to your photo album in Twitter. This didn't seem to happen when tweets were scheduled in Hootsuite and had pictures attached to them. I go into a little more detail on this in my #TuneUp Recap from one of our Weekly #TuneUps here at Tin Shingle.
Most important: Have fun with it! Seriously. Twitter is very fluid, so don't go all corporate and take 45 days to approve one tweet.
