Twitter is frequently overshadowed by Facebook both as a social network and a site to advertise on. However, just after four years, Twitter’s advertising options have become a major asset to many. It’s flexibility for ad campaigns, plus their rapidly growing audience, has very nearly changed the advertising game. At the very least, all businesses should seriously consider Twitter when planning their ad strategy.
If your business needs help in Twitter Advertising, Harris Web Works (formerly Medium Well) has years of online marketing experience to help you find your business’s strongest path. The most important part is bringing what sets your business apart and making it the centerpoint of your business strategy, and we can design and execute a strategy that does just that so your efforts stand apart. This includes creating tweets that appeal to the most people, finding the best options to target your audience amidst Twitter’s many options, and creating a long-term plan that can be adjusted based on the results. We’ll help you maximize your reach on this new yet powerful ad platform and get your message to even more potential leads and customers.
Twitter Advertising Options
Twitter gives businesses many choices in their ad campaigns, so it’s easy to fine-tune their strategy towards whatever their needs were. These most important ones include:
- Objectives: These are the goals you have for each ad campaign, and Twitter only charges businesses whenever these are met. There’s a wide range of objectives, from basic interactions like getting followers, retweets, clicks on links, replies, favorites, or even conversions, app installs, email signups and other lead generations.
- Content: All tweets include plain text and can also use images and video.
- Audience Targeting: Twitter lets ads target users based on many different factors. It can be based on their followers, who they follow, their interests, basic location, gender, what language they speak, their current device or even their operating system.
Best Practices for Twitter Ads
- Target a narrow audience – Similar to Facebook and LinkedIn advertising, it’s important to find a narrow audience instead of one too broad. Businesses should find a small yet still powerful niche group to appeal to, otherwise most users won’t see why the ad matters to them and brush it aside. Some examples are college organizations, recent mothers, adults looking for housing in a certain area, or other businesses in specific industries. For example, one option for ads is to target users following specific accounts. It can be tempting to chose users with millions of followers, since it means reaching a larger audience, but avoid this. Larger followings means a business is less likely to target users who will actually be interested and click their ads. It’s better to target the followers of users with a smaller following that’s more interested in what a business have to offer. They’re the ones most likely to respond to ads.
- Make tweets short and visual – Twitter ads without images or video almost always underperform compared to those that have them. Always include interesting media with your tweet, as they’re much more likely to get people’s attention. But while including an image is important, including less text is also important. Shorter tweets that get right to the point have much more appeal to users, since they don’t distract them as much from all the other tweets they’re reading. Businesses should say what they do, how it can help the viewer, include a link and an image, and not linger too long after that.
- Add relevant hashtags and keywords – Don’t forget that Twitter lets ads be found beyond the groups they’re targeted towards. Users searching for similar tweets are likely to stumble upon a business’s ads, and this should be encouraged. This means businesses should research common keywords and trending hashtags and try to work the most effective ones into their ads to increase their reach. As long as the tweets don’t get too off-message or use inappropriate hashtags, they can be a powerful boost to ad campaigns.