A Beginner’s Guide to Advertising on Twitter

Is your business using Twitter? Perhaps you are struggling to get seen by your target customers, or you want to give you follower numbers a boost?

Twitter's active user base has grown to more than 200 million, with an average of 400 million tweets posted every day. The social media platform now allows for brands and businesses to promote themselves using their self-service advertising platform, which launched at the end of last year.

You may have noticed Twitter ads being used in the platform, as they are highlighted with a yellow ‘Promoted’ label. The ads show up in the Twitter newsfeed on mobile and on desktop, and you can also pay to be a recommended user to follow or a trending topic.

Twitter ads can be a great solution for a few common marketing objectives, including:

• Better brand awareness: Use Twitter ads to increase your exposure to a brand new audience that you have carefully selected the criteria for.
• Promotions: Use Twitter ads to promote a specific campaign, competition or event. Twitter users are following brands to get information on discounts and free stuff so will be looking for this content and will respond to it well.
• Followers: Pay-per-follow to grow the follower base and leverage this audience for future promotions and dialogue.

There are three main advertising products you can buy on Twitter.

1. A promoted tweet, which sits in the newsfeed of your target audience.
2. A promoted account, which sits on the right hand side and encourages users to click the ‘follow’ button.
3. A promoted trend, which sits on the right hand side of the Twitter feed and is usually preceded by a hashtag.

As with other social media advertising options like Facebook, adverts can be targeted to specific audiences based on the information they have filled out in their profiles and their behaviour on the channels.

The adverts can be targeted to specific audiences, such as location, gender and interests. You can also target users based on who else they are following. Brands can target users who are similar to those following their competitors, influencers, or just other similar companies.

For example, Adidas can actually target users who are similar to Nike's and Reebok’s.

Ikea could target users who are similar to those following Homebase and Habitat.

One of the most interesting parts of Twitter advertising is the ability to target your adverts to anyone tweeting about specific topics, through keyword targeting.

So if you are a healthy food shop based in Birmingham, you could target anyone tweeting using the word ‘organic’ based in Birmingham, or even the West Midlands.

You can use any combination of targeting options, so you can begin to serve your adverts to a very relevant audience.

The adverts are bought on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis so that you only pay for what results you want to achieve, whether it’s followers, website clicks or retweets – this is something you state from the beginning.

The cost of the adverts range depending on who you are targeting, but a general average is around £0.50 - £1.00 per click. We would advise starting with a budget of £100 or so, and testing different audience targeting options. This way you’ll know which audience segments work for the future – whether its males or females, or what interests they have.

If you are interested in running a Twitter advertising campaign, we can set it up and manage it on your behalf. Give us ring on 01743 272609 or email studio@vibecreative.co.uk if you’d like to chat further.