Tips to Improve Your Twitter Ad Campaigns

The world of digital marketing changes frequently. You have to pay attention to trends in online advertising or you’ll quickly fall behind.

The shelf life of a tweet has been measured to be four times shorter than a post on Facebook, only 24 minutes compared to 90 minutes. With facts like that, it may be a challenge to get your tweets to stick in the minds of users. But you can do it if you take the time to learn and build on your current methods.

Before you start learning how to improve your ads, you have to understand the various ad types available. The one that’s right for you will depend on the results that you want to achieve. Here’s a look at the different types of ads and how to use them.

Types of Twitter Ads

Promoted Tweets

Promoted tweets are actively pushed to new users, and users that don’t follow you. They’re just like regular tweets except they indicate that they’re promoted.

You can use this type of ad If you want to increase the reach of your tweets beyond your current followers, or to push a particular tweet to your followers. They’ll appear in quite a variety of places, making them a great tool to expand your reach:

• At the top of relevant search results
• In the results for Promoted Trends
• On home timelines
• On relevant user profiles
• Through official Twitter desktop and mobile clients

Image credit: Marketing Land

Promoted Accounts

Much like promoted tweets, these promoted accounts are designed to expand your follower base by exposing your content to new users. Promoted accounts will be displayed on Home Timelines, the Who to Follow panel, and search results.

Image credit: Marketing Land

Promoted Trends

Promoted trends are just what they sound like: topics that you can pay to have trend on Twitter. They’ll appear at the top of the Trending Topics widget, are marked as ‘Promoted,’ and will occasionally appear on users’ timelines.

Promoted trends are currently not available for self-serve advertisers.

Image credit: AdEspresso

Website Cards

If your goal is to drive more traffic to your website, you can use website cards to showcase your content while encouraging a specific action. Website cards are similar to normal tweets but they have a headline, a photo, and a “read more” or “visit now” button.

App Cards

If you have an app, you can encourage more downloads with app cards. Twitter users will click on the CTA that you will provide, and that will lead them to the app store to install your app. Or, if they already have the app, it will open it up.

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— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) June 20, 2014

Video Ad

These ads can include videos, sound clips, or GIFs. They can include direct tweet buttons or provide a CTA for people to click.

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— Twitter Marketing (@TwitterMktg) January 13, 2015

How to Improve your Twitter Ad Campaigns

Create a Plan

The first step is always to create a plan for your strategy. This is how you determine the kind of ads that you will be using.

Factors that you should include can be: overall goals, your customer profiles, how you will measure your success, influencers to tap, and your editorial calendar.

Define Your Target Market

For you to effectively use the targeting options of Twitter, you need to have a clear picture of what kind of person you want to reach. This way you can create a focused content strategy for your campaign.

You should consider the age, gender, goals, interests, and hobbies of your possible followers. You can even get as detailed and specific as the customer profile below.

Image credit: Brandon Pugsley

Buy Twitter Followers and Other Forms of Engagement

If people see that you have a large following, they’ll be more likely to follow your account and check out your content, website, etc. This will further your social credibility and invite more followers to engage with you.

You can quickly and easily increase your social proof online by purchasing Twitter followers. A larger following means you’ll appear more popular online, encouraging people to pay more attention to your ads.

Create an Editorial Calendar

One thing that will give your campaign more clarity is the creation of a structured editorial calendar. This will become your guide for content creation and will help you maintain a level of consistency.

In designing the calendar, always remember to post at the most advantageous times. This will depend on your particular audience and can be determined through Twitter Analytics, but the best times tend to be around noon, 3 p.m., and from 5 – 6 p.m.

Use Advanced Targeting Features

If you want to maintain a positive ROI with your ads in the long-term, you’ll need a combination of using the right ad formats and targeting the right audience. Here are the following targeting options you should consider:

• Keyword Matching: Once you have chosen a set of keywords, Twitter will search for tweets containing them and show your ads to users who use those keywords as well.
• Followers: This allows you to target the followers of influencers, companies, and organizations.
• Email Lists: You can upload the emails of your customers on Twitter, and it will match their accounts and target them directly.
• TV Targeting: You can target people who watch certain TV shows.
• Event Targeting: This allows you to reach people involved with current events.
• Remarketing: Twitter allows you to target users who have have previously visited your site. You can even connect with people based on specific pages they have viewed.

Create Great Content

It’s challenging to create one-size-fits all content, and not usually a goal you should aim for. Different audiences will look for different types of content.

According to Buffer, these are some of the most popular types of content people look for on Twitter:

Image credit: Buffer

It seems that most users are interested in content about discounts and promos, free stuff, and entertainment. Not exactly a surprise, but good to know. In creating content, you can also take note of the following:

• Check the influencers of your industry for what kind of content they use.
• In conversation with other users, make sure you reply with something valuable.
• Create a sense of mystery and controversy only when it is appropriate, but posts like these can make you popular.

Reduce Ad Costs with Bidding Options

The default choice for Twitter ads is automatic bidding. You have an option to choose different bid types that will help you increase your exposure, which will help you get more followers and engagement.

You can choose your bid based on your budget. This will also depend on how much a lead, click, and engagement is worth to you. You may actually spend less than you offer. Just set the maximum amount you want to spend per lead or link click.

Image credit: Ad Espresso

Analyze Your Results

Remember that everything you do should be tied to a specific business goal. You’ll need to check your results and compare them to your previous situation in a detailed manner to fully understand your Twitter campaign.

If you don’t have solid proof, you can’t be sure of what happened and you won’t be able to replicate your success (or avoid repeating a mistake). These are some of the metrics you can also consider for gauging the success of your campaign:

• Follower growth
• Likes
• Retweets
• Shares
• Mentions
• Direct Messages
• Hashtag usage
• Impressions
• Click-throughs to your website
• Product purchases

Get Them To Notice You!

By following the tips we have shared, you can improve your ad performance on Twitter while making the most of the budget you have for it. You’ll able to reach your target market and, if you you design and enact a solid strategy, you’ll get more engagement and leads.

The key is to define your goals, choose the right ad formats, create engaging content, and measure your results. Don’t forget to buy Twitter Followers and other signs of engagement to accelerate your efforts even faster.

Take advantage of these ad types and develop a more engaging Twitter account. Understand these tips, and people will notice you in no time!

Image credit: Giphy