Twitter Ads Best Practice
With Twitter announcing its self-service ad platform to small businesses in the US this week, we assume most of you will be jumping at the chance to promote your account and content as soon as the service is rolled out.
Setting up Twitter ads is fairly simple but we thought we would give you some best practice tips to help you develop your strategy.
Which type of Twitter advertising should I be using?
Twitter offers 3 types of ads:
1. Promoted Tweets: target search results to connect your message to users searching for particular keywords. Target timelines to broaden your reach and engagement with interested users whenever they access Twitter.
Within promoted tweets, you have several options:
- Target search results
Your Tweets appear when users search for your targeted keywords
- Target timelines (min. of £0.30 per engagement: click, retweet, reply, favourite)
Your Tweets appear in targeted users’ timelines whenever they access Twitter (your followers or people similar toyour followers)
- Target your profile
Your Tweets appear at the top of your Twitter profile when users visit that page (completely free)
2. Promoted Accounts (min of £0.30 per follow): build your follower base by targeting users with particular interests. Your account will be promoted in search results for related keywords and the “Who to follow” section of Twitter.
3. Promoted Trend (minimum of £20,000 for a single day): broadcast your message to a large audience. Your trend will appear on the trending topic list for everyone for 24 hours. The trend search results will include your Promoted Tweet on top.
Depending on your budget, I would suggest focusing on promoted accounts first on a daily basis. This will allow you to grow your number of followers progressively.
You can then start thinking about promoted tweets for specific campaigns.
How should I allocate my budget?
Promoted accounts
First, decide on how much you want to spend weekly in promoted accounts. Review your KPIs and check the number of followers you gain naturally on average each month. Based on a cost per follower at approximately £2.04 according to Mashable, you can easily calculate the budget you need to allocate per week or month depending on the results you want to achieve.
e.g: you want to gain an extra 3,000 followers per month
Based on an average of £2.04 per follower, you can allocate £1,470 of spend per month (£367.50 per week, £52.5 per day)
Promoted tweets
Analyse your marketing plan and think of any upcoming activities within the next 6 months where you could incorporate promoted tweets and spread your budget accordingly (think of event-related campaigns that are likely to be trending topics i.e: Mother’s Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc..
Which interests/keywords should I target my ads at?
Promoted accounts
Targeting for promoted accounts is based on interest/twitter handles
The Twitter ad platform gives you great insight into your follower’s interests and whom else they follow.
Looking at those insights will help you define the key interests you want to target. (tip: if you want to target followers of a specific, make sure you add the @xx within your list)
Promoted tweets
To maximise the exposure of your tweet using target search results, make sure you monitor trending topics as often as possible (you can also check http://trendsmap.com/ for breaking topics as they will also have a high level of conversation and possibly of keyword searches).
Use relevant trending topic(s) in your keyword lists for your tweet to appear. But be careful, budget can spend fast so make sure you keep an eye on your dashboard!
To increase the level of engagement, always use the most relevant trending topics.
Target timelines and Target profile options don’t require any keywords.
Need more information? Twitter have released a Twitter advertising guide for small businesses (https://business.twitter.com/smallbiz_guide/)
For more bespoke advice, you can tweet us your questions @ispymarketing or post a comment below. Our social media team will be happy to help.
