Twitter have had their ‘Promoted Tweet’ advertising running
for a while now, and much to the delight of many businesses they recently
decided to up the ante by rolling out new options for API advertising on their
social network. But what does it all mean for your business? Take a look at
what exciting new features Twitter advertising has to offer and how exactly you
can use these to maximise your Twitter ad campaign success.
Promoted Tweets and
Accounts
Twitter has two main ways of promoting your company, and
both have two different end goals and outcomes. Promoted accounts means Twitter
will recommend your account to specific users as a person to be followed
because you will be of interest to them. Whereas Twitter would normally just
generate a random flow of potential accounts of interest for a user, you can
guarantee your account remains there until they follow with a promoted account,
and you then pay per click. So the goal of this would be to gain more
followers.
With promoted tweets, the goal is to gain more engagement
and/or drive traffic from your Twitter site to your actual website/blog via a
link within the tweet. When you promote a tweet, it will appear in users’ news
feeds who are most likely to find it of interest and will be posted there at
optimised times for maximum exposure, decided on by Twitter. Then you pay per
engagement (per link click, or reply, or RT, etc). You can also gain followers
through this method as if people like your tweet they are likely to check out
your page and follow, but if gaining followers is your main concern then the
promoted account ad will get you results faster.
How do they know which users will find it interesting you
ask? Read on to find out more about the targeting options that help Twitter get
to know your audience.
Targeting Options
Twitter offer a range of targeting options ranging from the
basic geographic targeting right up to specifics such as the device used to
access Twitter. In order for you to maximise campaign success using the various
available targeting options, you need to know what your target customers are
tweeting about, what and who they are engaging with, the typical language they
use to tweet, and what devices they use to access Twitter.
Keyword Targeting
Twitter recently decided they consider keywords to be of
first class importance when it comes to targeted advertising, allowing
advertisers to target their ads based on keywords that have appeared in a
Twitter user’s recent tweets and tweets they have engaged with (RTed, replied
to, etc). Twitter say this will improve user experience when it comes to ads,
as they won’t see an increase in Promoted Tweets in their timeline, and what
they will see will be much more relevant to their interests.
Interest Targeting
This feature allows you to target people who have similar
interests to a particular Twitter user. For example, if you wanted to target
users who were interested in digital marketing, you would use @Evonomie as the
main user, targeting all users who have similar interests to our followers. You
can also select from over 250 pre-specified interest categories, and Twitter
will target users based on if they follow and/or recently engaged with a
user/post relating to this interest.
Device Targeting
This option is perfect for people launching a new device or
platform specific app or website, as you can target users of the particular
device or platform only. For example, if you have launched a new mobile website
or app, you could set the ad to appear only when someone is using Twitter via
the Twitter mobile app or mobile website. If you are launching a new iOS app,
you could target only people using Twitter via the iOS app or website.
Twitter Ads API
For experienced companies who don’t feel that the basic
Twitter ads self-service interface is giving them enough options to play around
with, Twitter has now introduced ads API to the mix. Not only can you utilise
this to create a more tailored advertising platform for your company if you
have the resources, you could also help Twitter to improve its advertising
interface and receive a cut for your trouble.
With partners including Adobe, Salesforce and Hootsuite
already signed up to help Twitter and grab their share of the advertising
wealth, it’s a win-win situation as the advertising interface will improve and
generate more revenue for Twitter and more success for companies and their campaigns,
and they will get a share of that revenue as well as increased revenue of their
own due to their ad campaign success.
Costs and
Click-Through Rates for Twitter Advertising
The good thing about Twitter ads is that small businesses
can still get as much out of it on a minimal budget as larger companies can who
can afford a much larger budget.
With their self-service ads interface, you can go on and set
the budget you want to spend as well as utilise the targeting to ensure not a
penny gets wasted in irrelevant exposure or accidental clicks.
For a large business, the budget needed per day for Promoted
Tweets and Accounts is around £20k and for large US based businesses it’s
around $100k.
Small businesses are recommended to bid between 20p and
£2.00 (or $0.50 to $3.00 for US SMEs) per engagement for Promoted Tweets, and a
budget of £100 could be expected to last you around 4-7 days depending on the
keyword popularity.
Labels: geo-targeting, PPC advertising, PPC marketing, promoted accounts, promoted tweets, social media, Twitter ads API, Twitter advertising
