Twitter Marketing is something that’s normally left out of a lot of small businesses marketing strategy.
This is a huge mistake.
Twitter is a seriously great place to advertise if done correctly.
Not only is it one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, but its advertising platform has many benefits for advertisers, brands and companies.
In this article, we’ll discuss what you need to know about Twitter Advertising as well as some marketing tips to leverage your Twitter Ad campaigns.
Why Use Twitter Ads?
Let’s look at the data.
Statista has reported a total of 322.4 million active global Twitter users per month as of 2021. It is projected that by the end of 2022, that number will increase to 329 million users. And by the end of 2024, it would have accumulated to 340.2 million active Twitter global users.
That’s a lot of potential customers that your business can reach!
With this, advertising on Twitter can be used as either an additional paid advertising channel or an alternative to other forms of paid social media ads, such as Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads.
So if you haven’t advertised on Twitter, here are a few reasons why you should:
- Twitter Ads can be less costly.
- Twitter Ads are easy to set up and create.
- Twitter Ads are can be effective with the right approach and enough consistency.
Twitter Ad Formats
Follower Ads
From the name itself, this type of Twitter ad promotes your account to users who are not following you.
According to Twitter’s ad specs for Follower Ads, these ads “…appear as Promoted Tweets in the person’s timeline, and as Promoted Accounts in the Who to Follow boxes on the Home, Profile, and Search results pages.”
Therefore, you can use this ad format to showcase your Twitter account to your target audience, in order to gain new followers.
Here’s what a Follower Ad looks like:
Promoted Ads
When it comes to Promoted Ads, they are similar to the usual Tweets that users can see on Twitter. Users are able to engage with them such as leaving a like, retweeting or replying to the Tweets and so on. The aim of this ad type is to reach a larger audience or push for engagement.
Promoted Ads can appear on the search results, and on the timelines and profiles of users. All of these are based on the data you have input in your ad campaign. This is why it is important to input the proper details in your ad campaigns, as you don’t want your ads to be presented to users who are not even interested in what you have to offer.
To know more about the specifics of their placements, Twitter has provided a thorough overview here.
This is one example of what a Promoted Ad looks like:
Take note that with Promoted Ads, you can curate the following:
- Promoted Moments
If you find 280 characters to be quite short to fully tell a story through advertising, then Promoted Moments is worth considering.
Promoted Moments are a collection of Tweets that present a story or an impactful narrative that users are excited to see. We recommend taking a look at Promoted Moments further via this post from Twitter.
- Carousel Ads
Twitter Carousel Ads are similar to Facebook and Instagram carousel ads, where multiple images and videos are contained within one advertisement.
Using a maximum of 6 images or videos, or even a combination of both, advertisers can get creative with the content they want to share with their target audience that will drive engagement and awareness.
To view the best practices for Carousel Ads, click here to be directed to Twitter’s article.
Twitter Takeover Ads
If you’re looking to leverage Twitter advertising in hopes of achieving greater results then Twitter Takeover Ads might be the perfect option for you.
There are two Takeover Ads to choose from, which we’ve listed and expounded on below to help you decide which one to opt for:
- Timeline Takeover
With Timeline Takeover, your ad will be the first thing that people see when they open Twitter. It’s a great way to get your brand noticed in front of potential customers for a full 24 hours.
As per Twitter’s recommendation, you’ll want to use videos for your Timeline Takeover campaigns as well as combine your Timeline Takeover Ad with a Trend Takeover/Trend Takeover+ ad to achieve better results.
Here is an example from Twitter of what a Timeline Takeover ad looks like:
- Trend Takeover/Trend Takeover+
Trend Takeover ads show up in the explore tab’s Trends for you area as well as in the What’s Happening section.
According to Twitter’s article on Trend Takeovers, “When someone clicks on a Promoted Trend, they’ll see a Tweet from your brand at the top of the search results, followed by authentic Tweets directly from the conversation surrounding the trend.”
Just like Timeline Takeover ads, Trend Takeover ads run up to 24 hours.
With Trend Takeover+ ads these ads can present 6-second videos, GIFs, and static images. They are plastered at the top of the Explore tab wherein every user will see it per day on the basis of their first two visits.
Additionally, the Trend Takeover article also mentions, “After the initial two visits, the placement will move to the standard Trend Takeover placement and organic editorial content resurfaces in the Takeover+ placement.”
Twitter Amplify
If you’ve seen a YouTube Ad right before a video that you decided to watch, Twitter Amplify is similar to that. Twitter Amplify has two ad formats which are explained below:
- Amplify Pre-roll
Amplify Pre-roll provides advertisers with the opportunity to choose the category of the videos where their ad will be showcased.
- Amplify Sponsorships
Amplify Sponsorships allow advertisers to pair with a single publisher at any time of their choosing and provide Tweet-level control throughout the start and end of the campaign.
Although this is great, this is not made available to self-serve advertisers currently.
Twitter Live
Similar to the usual livestreams on other social media platforms, Twitter Live provides exactly this opportunity. Brands on Twitter are able to broadcast live events, allowing their audience to join and participate while the live event is ongoing. One of the ways you can use this ad type is if your Twitter advertising campaign is about a product launch or an event as big as such.
Twitter Ads Account Creation
Before creating your Twitter ad campaigns, you’ll need a Twitter account.
Step 1: Go to the Twitter Ads Page
On a new tab or window, type in ads.twitter.com and you will be directed to the Twitter Advertising platform where you can get started.
Step 2: Select Your Country and Time
Choose your country and the time zone, after which you will be directed to the campaign creation page.
Setting Up Twitter Ads
Twitter Ads Campaign
Step 1: Choose Your Objective
There are many Twitter advertising campaign objectives to choose from, in this example, we’ve chosen Website Traffic. However, each business is different and unique, so you’ll need to select the best Twitter Ad campaign objective that will cater to your main advertising goal.
For the majority of this article, let’s assume a fictitious company that sells runners for men and women.
As seen above, Twitter offers multiple campaign objectives according to categories such as Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.
To identify which objective is suited for your goals, you can find each of them detailed further via this link.
Step 2: Enter Your Campaign Name
For this step, we’ve named our campaign Elite Runners Collection, as our aim is to push the release of a new collection of runners.
Step 3: Add Your Funding Source
For some individuals, this option is set by Twitter and is unchangeable, but if you are able to add your preferred method of payment for your ads, proceed to do so.
Step 4: Add Your Daily Budget and Total Budget
Simply add the total and daily budget that you are willing to spend. We highly suggest that it is better to approach this slowly, instead of allocating a bigger budget in one go. In the end, you’ll need to do some split testing to identify which campaigns and ad groups performed better, so it wouldn’t be optimal to spend higher.
Step 5: Add Your Start and End Dates
This is self-explanatory, you’ll want to select the start and end dates for your Twitter Ads campaign.
Step 6: Choose Which Pacing Option You Prefer
After clicking the Advanced drop-down arrow, you’ll need to select either Standard or Accelerated pacing.
We recommend choosing the Standard mode especially if you’re just starting with Twitter Ads.
Twitter Ad Group Creation
Step 1: Enter Your Ad Group Name
For ad groups, we would advise starting with one to two ad groups if this is the first Twitter ad you are getting started with. By doing so, you’ll be able to understand how effective your ads are when compared to each other.
Step 2: Set Your Total Ad Group Budget
When setting your ad group budget, the same rule when setting your campaign budget earlier applies in this step. Only add the budget you are comfortable spending for Twitter ads. Even if this is the only paid advertising channel you plan on spending for, it’s always best to start a little low rather than spending all of your marketing budget on this one channel.
Later on, as you test and optimise, you’ll be able to get a sense of your Twitter Ads cost in terms of the best amount to spend for your ad groups.
Step 3: Set Your Start and End Date
Add the start and end dates for your ad group.
Step 4: Choose Your Ad Group Goal
Depending on the campaign objectives you’ve chosen earlier, the ad group goals will vary.
Because we’ve selected Website Traffic as our campaign objective, we’re presented with the following options:
- Site Visits
- Link Clicks
- Conversions
We’ve chosen Link Clicks for this particular step.
Step 5: Select Your Bid Strategy
For the bid strategy, this will again depend on the campaign objective you’ve selected previously. For reference, here’s a list of the bid strategy options you’ll be presented with for each campaign objective:
As you can see, the Autobid option is always available, and we in fact recommend selecting Autobid if this is your first campaign.
Step 6: Select the Gender and Age of Your Target Audience
In the example below, you’ll see that we’ve selected Any for the targeted genders, as well as limited the age group to users aged 21-49.
Step 7: Add Your Target Location and Desired Language
You can either target an entire country or narrow it down to specific cities. As presented below, we’ve chosen to target Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane. Depending on your location, you’ll need to select the language that will be understood by your target users. Based on the locations we’ve chosen, we decided to stick with English.
Step 8: Select Your Device Preferences
There are several selections to configure when it comes to the devices of your users. In this part of the article, we’ve provided a quick look at each of those preferences through the images (similar to the ones above) which you’ll find below:
- Operating System
- Device Model
- Carrier
For this step we didn’t select any specific device model or carrier, instead, we selected all operating systems.
Step 9: Create Your Audience
The first thing that you will see when executing this step is, the Include and Exclude options for Custom Audiences then you will be presented with more options such as App Activity, App Activity Combination, List and Website Activity.
You’ll notice that when you click on them, nothing will come out. This is because there wasn’t any information for any of the categories to pull from, and so we will have to create an audience in the Targeting Features section beginning with Keywords.
The following sections are what you’ll need to execute in order to create your audience.
Keywords
Still taking the example of our online store selling runners for men and women, the keywords we’ve included are Running, Workout, Gym, and Fitness. We want to target individuals who are not just running but also individuals who exercise, go to the gym and in general, are into fitness.
You will notice that for every keyword you add, there is a Global Audience Size accompanied to the keyword as shown below:
Once you’ve added all your keywords, you can see the estimated number of audiences you can reach:
Therefore, you’ll need to use both the Audience Estimate and Global Audience Size for each keyword as a guide to gauge how big your audience is when it comes to targeting your ad to them. You don’t want to simply add keywords that are irrelevant in order to increase the audience size, or worse, add keywords that don’t provide a good number of individuals to reach.
Follower Look-alikes
We’ve listed four shoe brands for our Follower Look-alikes and they are Nike, Adidas, Hoka and Saucony. Each of these brands also has its own global audience size:
When it comes to choosing your follower look-alikes, make sure that the Twitter accounts you select have followers that are identical to your target audience.
Interests, Movies and TV Shows, Events and Conversation Topics
We did not add specific movies, TV shows, events or conversation topics, but we did add some interests of our target users. Under the Hobbies and Interests category, we’ve chosen Exercise and Fitness. For the Sports category, we’ve chosen Running and Jogging as well as Sporting Goods. Try to spend some time looking into each of the categories in order to determine which can best represent what you are advertising.
Additional Options
For the Additional Options, we’ve expounded below on each of the choices given:
- Retarget People Who Saw or Engaged With Your Past Tweets
By selecting this option, you can retarget individuals based on those who saw your Tweets or those who engaged with them and more.
- Expand Your Audience
As seen in the image below there are a few options to choose from when expanding your audience. Select the one that will best help you achieve your advertising goal.
- Target Your Account’s Followers
You can also target your ads to be seen by your followers.
Step 10: Secure Your Placements
When it comes to ad placements, it’s important to remember that your ad placements are also based on your campaign objective. So if you chose Followers as your campaign objective, then the ad placements available for you would be Home Timelines and Profiles.
However, if you chose Website Traffic, your ad placements would be Home Timelines, Profiles and Search Results.
At this point, you might have already figured out that some options will be available on certain campaign objectives. Feel free to explore and dive deeper into these objectives, to thoroughly have a firm understanding of how each of them can help leverage your brand later on when you set up new or additional campaigns.
Step 11: Add Your Twitter Audience Platform Preferences
In this step, you’ll need to configure the following:
- Formats
- Ad Categories
- App Website Domain
Set Up Your Ad Creatives
Step 1: Create Your Tweet
For this step, you can use a previous Tweet or create a new one. In the example below we will choose from a list of existing Tweets.
Take note that some objectives will give you different ad creative options. For instance, the Pre-roll Views objective is entirely different compared to the campaign objective that we’ve chosen earlier which is Website Traffic. Take a look at the image below to see what the Pre-roll Views objective offers:
Because we will select an existing Tweet to advertise, we’ll choose the Tweet about the ZEUS X2 collection:
Step 2: Launch Your Twitter Ad
Before launching your campaign, you’ll be presented with the details of your ad group and your campaign which you need to re-check. Once you do, click the Launch Campaign button and voila! You’ve published your ad!
Additional Tips
Follow Twitter’s Ad Specs
When creating your ad, it’s important to follow Twitter’s Ad Specs. This will ensure that your ad is displayed correctly and that you’re getting the most out of your advertising budget.
Some of the Twitter Ad specs included in Twitter’s Ad Creative guide are:
- Accepted file types for image ads
- Uploading GIFs automatically become static images
- Recommended video bitrate and frame rate
- Aspect Ratios
Continuously Test and Optimise
Twitter advertising offers business owners an efficient way to reach their target users. However, in order to achieve the best results, it’s essential to continuously test and optimise your ads. This means adjusting your campaign settings, target audience, and ad creatives to find what works best for you. Additionally, monitoring your analytics data will help you understand more about your Twitter ads strategy especially when it comes to making decisions that will impact your goals.
For instance, Promoted Tweets with images might be more useful when improving brand visibility during certain seasons. On the other hand, video ads are great for driving website traffic when showcasing your lesser-known products in a more engaging way.
Things to keep in mind when testing:
- Keep your target users in mind when creating your Twitter ad campaign
- It’s always better to experiment with different ad group details
- Keep track of both incremental and large changes that affect your ad groups and creatives
By faithfully testing and optimising, you’re one step closer to achieving a successful Twitter advertising campaign.
Make Use of Twitter’s Ad Features
Twitter provides a variety of ad features that can be added to the ad formats discussed above in order to really drive website traffic, video views or any other objective you want your campaign to achieve. These features are:
- Polls
- Conversation Buttons
- App Buttons
- Website Buttons
- Branded Hashtags
- Branded Notifications
You’ll find all of these features discussed by Twitter via this link.
Conclusion
All in all, Twitter Ads can be a great way to reach new customers and achieve your other business or brand goals. But like any other marketing endeavour, it takes a bit of know-how and planning to make sure you’re getting the most out of your investment when you advertise on Twitter.
Contact us today so we can help you set up campaigns that generate results and create an effective strategy for reaching more people on Twitter with your message. Thanks for reading!
