The Ins and Outs of Advertising on Twitter

We’ve recently discussed about how to effectively use social media advertising with tactics for both Facebook and LinkedIn. Now it’s time to chat about how to reach your audience with 140 characters or less. Let’s talk Twitter!

Tips to Effectively Advertise on Twitter
If you’ve spent any time on the platform, you know it’s fast-paced and all about brevity. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to stand out so users don’t just scroll quickly by your ad. There are a few simple and effective ways to do this.

• One way is to include one or more images that display or help explain your product or service. Since you have limited word space, a graphic will grab attention.
• Tweeples love to laugh (who doesn’t?). You can also use humor in your ad, which is a proven tactic in many past successful ad campaigns. If you can elicit a chuckle or a full-on guffaw, users are more likely to engage with you.
• You may also want to offer some sort of discount or special offer. People love deals (again, who doesn’t?)! A percentage or dollar amount off a purchase may attract more followers and provide extra incentive to click on your ad or hit the re-tweet button.
• Also be sure to include a call-to-action that encourages users to respond right away. “Click here to sign up.” “Order now and save 20% off your purchase.”
• You can also use a hashtag in your messaging and entice people to use to and spread the word of your campaign. Track your reach with tweetreach.

Perhaps the most important consideration is your audience itself. How do you attract relevant followers and get the right people seeing your ad? There are a number of options. You are able to target your add by specific locations, and personalizing the ad to an area may be very effective if your product or service is based on local users. You can also target users based on industry, interests, and even the type of device they use (beneficial when advertising products like apps or a sign-up service that may be more easily done on a desktop or laptop, than a mobile device).

Twitter also offers the option to find followers based on a competitor’s following, targeting similar audiences.

Costs of Twitter Ads
You have a few choices when advertising on Twitter. The two most cost-effective are promoted tweets or promoted accounts, which offer a lower cost per engagement. With sponsored tweets, you only pay when there is interaction with your tweet, such as favoriting, retweeting or replying to It.

A promoted account costs slightly more and targets new followers in addition to engagement. You can target potential followers by interest or location, for example. A promoted trend is the most effective method of advertising to get people to see your ad, but it also costs the most, and is likely well beyond the reach of most small- to average-sized businesses. That’s because it’s a quick, easy way to be noticed and attract engagement, since it appears in the list of trending topics on the site. For example, this morning I was shown that Pepsi had placed a promoted trend that showed up at the top of my main trends list. It’s safe to assume, most of my clients will not have the same advertising budget as Pepsi!

Promoted tweets and accounts may take a bit longer to gain traction and you may have to play around with them a bit to start attracting engagement, but it can definitely pay off once you find out which ads are working for you.

Who Should Use Twitter Advertising
The simple answer to whether you should use Twitter advertising, is determining if your potential clients or audience are there. If they are, you should be too. Twitter is its own unique platform, and with It, has a different feel, use and audience than Facebook. While Facebook offers the chance to connect with family and friends, Twitter users are there to learn and engage, generally offering more interaction between brands and atmosphere.

Twitter advertising has a low cost of entry so really it can fit any budget and offers a better bang for your buck in comparison to Facebook ads. Not a lot of businesses are doing Twitter advertisements so this means you can start it before the wave hits and drives the price and saturation through the roof.

Your Goals with Twitter Advertising
This type of advertising allows you to discover what you audience responds too. By seeing which ads have higher engagement, such as through interactions on Twitter and click-through rates, you can promote and expand the ones with higher resonance. You can learn more about the specific logistics of advertising on Twitter by clicking here.

And even though, I said it above, it’s worth repeating: find your audience! Engage! Interact! Those are the key components to finding success in the Twitterverse and ensuring your business or brand benefits from it.