Not yet on Twitter, or wondering how Twitter advertising can help your small business? Then consider these facts: by June last year, nearly 80% of US marketers were using promoted Tweets, and Promoted Tweets have shown average engagement rates of 1-3 percent—much higher than traditional banner ads.
Advertising on this platform just got easier with this step by step guide to assist you.
types of ads
There are three different kinds of Twitter Ads: Promoted Accounts, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Tweets.
- Promoted Tweets are messages that will appear directly in the timelines of the Twitter users you targeted and at a specific time you have bid on.
- A Promoted Account is an ad that invites targeted Twitter users to follow your brand – attracting more of the right followers to your brand faster.
- Trending topics on Twitter are the most talked about subjects on the social network, appearing on the left side of the page. Promoted Trends allow you to put your story at the top of that list for 24-hours.
Your Twitter ad campaigns will be categorized by objective. Twitter ads can have Tweet engagement, website clicks or conversions, app installs or app engagement, video views, follower growth, and Twitter lead collection as possible objectives. Your choice will depend on what you hope to achieve with your ads, your audience and your budget, since some of these objectives will drain your budget faster than others (engagement is far easier to achieve than app installs).
Audience and targeting
Twitter is one of the social ad platforms that allows you to target your ads to specific groups of people. Like most platforms, Twitter allows you to target based on location, gender, languages, interests and device. You can also upload specific lists of people (your email list for example) to target with ads.
But Twitter targeting is especially valuable if you’re looking to target people based on their networks. Basically, if you have a coffee shop in Vancouver, the strength of Twitter ads is that you can target audiences already following rival coffee shops in the city. You can also target people who are similar to your follower base, which is a great way to find your target audience.
Pricing
The cost of Twitter ads depends really on the ad type. Promoted Tweets and accounts might cost you anywhere from 50 cents to 10 dollars or more per engagement (video view, link click, follow, etc.) based on how targeted your ad is. Promoted Trends on the other hand have been reported to cost $200,000 a day.
The key here is testing your ads. Run a few short campaigns with a small budget to find out which objective is right for your audience and your budget. Twitter only charges you when a user completes the action set out in your campaign objective anyways, so all of these campaigns will provide some value. Good advice for advertisers is to look at what other advertisers are bidding for similar ads, which is information Twitter provides anyways.
How to buy
Once you sign into the Twitter ads platform (and insert your payment information), actually buying Twitter ads is a simple six-step process.
Step 1: Start a new ad campaign
You will have to name your campaign, choose your funding source and customize your start and end dates before anything else.
Step 2: Choose ad objective
The next step towards building you ad is choosing a campaign objective. Simply select an option from Twitter’s list.
Step 3: Target your ad
Choose from among Twitter’s targeting options. They provide an estimated audience size to help guide you.
Step 4: Build your ad
Build your ad by adding copy, and any images and video.
Step 5: Set your budget
You can set daily maximum as well as total campaign budgets. Twitter stops showing your ads once your budget has been reached, so that you don’t have to manually end campaigns to avoid being charged.
Step 6: Place your bid and start advertising
Purchasing Twitter ads works on a bidding system. You set your bid for how much you’re willing to spend for a specific user action (website visit, retweet, etc.). Others will be placing competitive bids, but the most you’ll pay is one cent more than the next highest bid. Once you win your bid, your ads will immediately go into play. They’ll continue until your budget runs out.
Good luck with those campaigns!
Brownie Communication Concepts