October 13, 2016

4 Tips for Advertising on Twitter

By Alex Ghattas

Read Time: 3.5 minutes

Twitter has grown as an instantly connected social media platform since its inception in 2006. Everyone from celebrities to politicians to industry thought leaders and everyone in between use the site to voice their opinions, learn particular topics and engage with one another. Because of this, Twitter has become a place where people go to connect instantly with their favorite people and brands.

This allows brands an opportunity to connect and engage with their consumers. In fact, 85% of Twitter users report feeling more connected to a brand after following them on Twitter. There are multiple ways in which to engage these brand-conscious consumers on Twitter. Following are some tips that will help you build your following and create a better brand experience on Twitter.


1. Go Mobile:
First, you have to understand that 80% of Twitter users are using the Twitter app via a mobile device. This means that it is very important to have a landing page that is responsive and optimized for mobile devices, as well as desktop users. We talk about how important responsive landing pages are in this blog post. If you’re landing page is not responsive, you’re already behind the curve. We highly suggest using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if you’re firing on all cylinders.

 

2. Choose the right Conversion Metric:
Want more visitors to your website? Want to get people to download your app or sign up for your event? Twitter is a great way to promote these types of business objectives. This is important to know because Twitter isn’t great at getting people to fill out a forms/surveys or registering for a webinar.

One of the best conversion methods on Twitter is utilizing their website card. It is a great option to increase quality website traffic, drive app downloads, or increase engagement with your audience. Twitter website cards are great because it allows you to add both a picture and a call to action to your tweets.

 

3. Choose your audience:
Like most other social media advertising, you can get granular with your targeting. You can advertise to certain genders, devices, interests and locations.

What’s really cool about Twitter is that you can target people that are followers of specific handles. Have a thought leader or business whose followers might also be interested in you? You can target those followers with your ad. This is known as follower targeting.

So for example, if I’m selling tickets to an event, (let’s say the NCAA Men’s Water Polo Championship) I can target the followers of specific teams. Follower targeting gives you some pretty great metrics as well.

After your campaigns are live you can see which particular handle is performing the best compared to others. This allows you to see which handles are converting better and allocate funds to them as opposed to ones that are spending a lot but not converting all that great. Twitter will also suggest particular handles that are similar to the handles you are targeting which helps drive more traffic to your brand.

 

4. Set your budget:
Like all marketing budgets, you have to first determine what a new lead is worth to you. With this information, you can better determine how much you should allocate to finding and capturing those leads as customers. You should set your budget less than what the result is worth to you.

Once you have these figures, you need to divide that amount by the number of days you want your campaign to run and you have your daily max budget.

You should adjust these as your campaign runs based on your comfort level and what makes sense for your business.

 

Conclusion
Twitter offers small businesses the ability to target people in a place that is increasingly hard to serve ads to their mobile phones. Taking advantage of a platform where users are engaged and willing to share their thoughts about your brand to the world is a great practice to get started with. 

Follow these four steps and you will have great success when starting out your Twitter advertising campaign. Just remember, good advertising takes time, effort and a lot of planning and revision. Don’t get frustrated if you don’t see the results, just go back to the drawing board.