5.03 – Advertising on Twitter
Advertising on Twitter
Like Facebook, Twitter offers you the ability to reach more people through advertisements. By using Twitter ads, you can create campaigns to meet specific goals, gain followers, and drive engagement.
In this section, you explore how to get started with Twitter ads and how to use them to achieve your goals.
Promoting your tweets
Promoted tweets, like organic tweets, may include hashtags, rich media, and links to your website, and they offer the same forms of engagement: replies, favourites, and retweets.
Unlike organic tweets, however, you can target non-followers by demographics, interests, keywords, geography, device, similarity to current followers, and more. You pay only when someone engages with your tweet. Whether you promote an existing organic tweet or create a new one, you can reach a new audience to grow your Twitter presence.
Promoted tweets may appear in other places besides viewers’ timelines, including in search results for terms or trends, on Twitter’s mobile products, and syndicated to some third-party clients, such as Hootsuite.
Pretest your content or look at results of existing organic tweets to select one for promotion that already performs well.
For more information on the different campaign types, see https://business.twitter.com/en/advertising/campaign-types.html.
Followers campaign
Like a promoted tweet, a followers campaign can be targeted to your desired audience. However, it differs from a tweet in content and format. A follower campaign ad includes a card that displays your Twitter profile background header image, bio, and a “Follow” button, allowing users to follow your account with one click. Although you can include an image or video, Twitter recommends against it because it’ll show up as a pic.twitter URL link.
For this type of promotion, you might want to target users who are similar to your existing followers, are similar to influential figures in your industry, or share an interest in the products, services, issues, or concepts relevant to your business.
Follower campaign ads appear in somewhat different places than promoted tweets. In addition to the timeline, they appear in the Who to Follow section, which appears on multiple pages as well as in search results. For this ad type, you’ll only be charged for the follows you acquire from that campaign. All other actions and engagements (impressions, replies, and Retweets for example) are free.
Promoting a trend
Promoted Trends appear in the first or second slots of the “Trends for you” section in the Explore tab, as well as the “What’s Happening” section on Twitter.com, for 24-hours. When someone clicks on a Promoted Trend, they’ll see a tweet from your brand at the top of the search results, followed by tweets from other users that pertain to that trend.
Promoted trends are fairly subtle. They make sense for large corporate branding campaigns, when you need to reach a mass (relatively untargeted) audience, or if you want to launch a new product line – say to promote the next Apple iPhone introduction.
A promoted trend generally boosts tweets about your brand for about two weeks. Think of it as a top-of-funnel feeder, getting a large number of people to at least hear about you.
Engaging your Twitter audience
It does sometimes seem that social media platforms are spending more time watching their competitors than developing new ideas of their own. Fortunately, Twitter, like Facebook, enables you to place ads that help you to achieve your goals and provide an engaging, interactive experience for your audience.
While your audience reacts to your content, you can achieve the following objectives:
» Increase traffic or conversions on your website. Follow Twitter’s targeting options for keywords, location, or interest to drive a more qualified audience to your website.
» Increase the number of installations of your app or engagement with it. Create campaigns designed so that Twitter users can download and open your app from a tweet.
» Increase your Twitter followers. Target Twitter users who are most like your current followers or who match the profile of those you seek as followers.
» Increase video views. Get more people to see and engage with your video content.
» Pair your ad with premium content. By running a pre-roll ad connected to brand-safe videos from 200+ premium publishers, your ad gets maximum exposure.
» Improve lead generation. Add a special lead generation card to your tweet. This allows prospects to share their contact information with two simple clicks instead of leaving Twitter or filling out a form. Then, all you have to do is follow up.
For more information on campaign types, see https://business.twitter.com/en/advertising/campaign-types.html or https://business.twitter.com/en/help/account-setup/campaigns-101.html.
Creating an ad on Twitter
Twitter’s ad prices are based on actions other than clicks. You bid a price for a specific action based on the type of advertising you choose. You’re charged a flat price only when a viewer takes that action, whether it’s submitting information through your campaign, following you, or retweeting.
Twitter doesn’t charge for organic tweets.
If you’ve never used Twitter ads before, you’ll need to set up an account. Just log into your Twitter account, then head to https://business.twitter.com/en/advertising.html. Enter your country and time zone, then click the Let’s go button.
You cannot create ads right after you create an account. Twitter holds your account in review “for a period” before you can start creating ads. Take this into consideration when planning your Twitter advertising activities.
Follow these steps to create a campaign, then an ad.
- When logged into your Twitter account, go to https://business.twitter.com/en/advertising.html.
- Click the Create an ad button in the centre of the screen.
Alternatively, you can click the Start a Campaign button on the top right of the screen.
- Select your campaign objective from the eight choices on the list and click Next.
The choices are:
- Followers: Helps you to grow a Twitter follower base
- Website Clicks: Directs people to your website or specific sales pages
- Engagements: Geared toward encouraging retweets, likes, and conversation
- App Instals or Re-engagements: Promotes your apps to new users
- App Re-engagements: Encourages previous users of that app to revisit
- Video views: Gets people to watch your video
- Pre-roll views: Pairs your ad with premium, pre-selected (and brand-safe) content
- Reach: Maximises your ad’s reach to grow awareness
- Name your campaign.
Campaigns are the overarching goal of your ads. Choose a name that describes your goal or target audience.
- Enter your funding source, daily budget, or total budget.
- Select your start and end dates.
- (Optional) Click the Advanced link and select a pacing option.
You can have your ad shown steadily throughout the day (recommended) or accelerated if your campaign is under time constraints.
- Click Next.
Now it’s time to create an Ad Group. For the purpose of this example, we selected the Followers campaign objective.
- Enter your Ad Group name.
Ad Groups are collections of ads under a campaign. You can have multiple ad groups under one campaign.
- (Optional) Select a start and stop time as well as a total ad group budget.
- Choose a bid type.
The options are Automatic bid (recommended) or target cost, which maintains an average cost per action.
- Select your audience.
You can target specific ages and demographics, including location, language, gender, mobile users, and more.
- Choose your ad placement.
You can place ads in a Twitter user’s home timeline or deliver to users when they visit profiles.
- Under Creative Options, select the tweet you want to promote.
The customization options underneath the Creative heading depend on the campaign objective you chose at the beginning.
- Click Next on the bottom right.
- Review your ad and customizations and if everything looks okay, click Launch Campaign.
If you want to change something, click Back on the bottom left. Or if you want to step away and return to your ad to finish it up, click Save draft.
Dealing with Twitter cards
Twitter cards allow you to attach photos, videos, and other rich media to tweets to drive them to a website or your app. Twitter cards themselves are free, but they’re not standalone ad types. Rather, they have to be attached to an ad (that isn’t free). Twitter cards can only be used in organic Promoted-only tweets.
Twitter offers the following types of cards:
» Website card: Includes title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account information
» Video website card: Same as the default summary card, plus a large photo
» Image app card: One photo only
» Video app card: Four photos
To create a Twitter card, follow these steps:
- When logged into your Twitter account, go to your Twitter Ads Manager at https://business.twitter.com/en/advertising.html.
- Click the Creatives link on the top menu bar and select Cards from the drop-down menu.
- Click the blue Create Card button in the centre of the screen and select one of the four card types from the drop-down menu.
For the purpose of this example, I selected the Website card option.
- Click the Media button and upload an appropriate image.
You can either drag the image or click the Browse link to locate it on your computer.
Be sure to select an image that represents your brand well.
- Type your headline.
Make sure it’s eye-catching and complimentary to your website.
- Add your website’s URL.
This is where the Twitter card will be sending viewers.
- Type a name for your card.
The name can be anything, but make sure it’s easy for you to recognize when selecting it for your ad creative.
- Click the blue Create button.
When you’re ready to promote your card, head back to your cards library, hover over the card you’d like to promote and click the compose tweet icon (it looks like a quill pen). Type what you want to say and then click “tweet”. After that, you’ll be able to select this Tweet as creative for campaigns.
Note: Your Twitter account must be public in order to utilise Twitter cards.
