Twitter Advertising

When using Twitter you may have noticed that occasionally there are ads that pop up on your Twitter feed.  These ads have been put together by businesses that want to attract more attention to their product or service.  The good news is that it is not difficult to advertise on Twitter and you could reach an even greater audience than just your own followers.

First steps

Work out what your budget is going to be.  It does not cost a lot of money to start a Twitter advertising campaign and you could potentially recoup this small outlay many times over.  There are actually three different ways to advertise on Twitter, so all you have to do is decide which is going to be the most effective for your business based on what your goals are.

Attracting new followers

You can choose a follower ad campaign designed to boost the number of followers you have.  This will increase your account’s visibility on the site and your posts will show up in a person’s timeline as a Promoted Tweet.  Your account can also be seen as a Promoted Account when users look at the ‘who to follow’ section.  If you want to create a campaign like this go to the ‘Twitter Ads’ section on the site. The instructions are easy to follow and you can tailor it to your own requirements. You can target the ads towards users that fit a certain profile.

Boosting traffic

You can also create a website clicks or conversion campaign that will help drive users to your website. Perhaps your goal is to encourage more people to place orders or sign up for newsletters. In the navigation bar on Twitter choose the Conversion Tracking option.  Here you can select the ‘Create New Website Tag’ and name it.  This will help to track site visits, purchases, signups, downloads, or you can create your own custom option. Twitter gives you a piece of code that you can put onto your website and tags are reported back to Twitter, where you will see them as part of your campaign reports. From here you can then define your audience again, so that it targets users by their interests.  Then you create the tweets that you want to use for your campaign. These can be the standard length tweets or you can choose the ‘website card’ for a tweet that has an additional 70 characters.

Generating leads

Choose a ‘leads on Twitter’ campaign and this allows users to automatically sign up to your email newsletters and other registrations.  Twitter already has its users’ details so it will help fill in any forms automatically when the user clicks on it.  You set this up in a similar way to the Website Clicks campaigns, just choose ‘Leads on Twitter’ as your campaign. All you have to do is create your tweet, save it and watch it go!

Don’t forget to track the results of your campaigns so that you can refine the process and see what is working for you and your business. We hope you found this post helpful. If you’re new to Twitter, make sure to check out our Twitter Tips for Businesses.