How to Launch Your First Twitter Ad Campaign

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Three hundred and sixteen million people use Twitter every month and somehow only 1,000 people saw your Tweets. How is that possible?

The struggle for eyeballs on Twitter is real. With 500 million Tweets being sent every day, it isn’t easy to get people to stop scrolling just for you. Plus, being seen is only half the battle. It really isn’t only about how many views and clicks you can get, but more about who these engagements are coming from. You’re essentially trying to walk into a football stadium full of people with a name tag on, and trying to connect with one person in particular.

The good news is, Twitter provides everyone with a solution for breaking through the crowd. Twitter ads are like the jumbotron, a powerful way to ensure your content, and your business, are being seen on the social network, while supporting your broader business goals. Their advertising tools are simple to use and are open to anyone. So, what are you waiting for?

To help you get started, we’ve broken down how to launch your first Twitter Ad Campaign in seven steps.

1. Set your Twitter advertising goals

As with anything you do on social media, the first step in your Twitter ad campaign should be to determine exactly what you want to get out of it. Setting goals is essential to deciding how you’re going to approach the ad, and knowing whether or not it was worth the time and effort.

When it comes to Twitter ads, goals are built directly into the platform. When building your ad, you’ll be prompted to choose an ad objective. Your choices are between Tweet engagements, website clicks or conversions, app installs or re-engagements, followers, leads on Twitter or video views.

Those six options offer a great starting point to guide your early Twitter campaigns. That said, they are by no means the be-all end-all of goals you can strive for with Twitter ads. You should always look at your broader social media goals first, and see how Twitter advertising might help you achieve them. Are you trying to drive sign-ups of your new event? You might want to target people in your industry and area with a Promoted Tweet containing a discount code. Are you trying to steal a few eyeballs from your competitors? A well placed video, like that from Alibaba below, which was found when searching “Amazon” on Twitter, might work wonders. Twitter offers a “custom objective” option with these unique goals in mind.

Twitter ads can support any number of goals. Setting your expectations in advance will help you choose the right audience and content for your ads, and help you determine whether the campaign was a success or a failure when things are all said and done.

2. See what content performs organically

Did you know that there are at least 12 things you can test on Twitter? These include:

  • Content formatting
  • Messaging
  • Media
  • Times and intervals

You don’t want to be testing each of these things with your hard earned-money. Thankfully, you can test them all for free.

The ability to test the performance of social media content organically before promoting it is one of social’s greatest advantages over traditional advertising. This process shows you exactly what content resonates with your audience in advance, saving you time and budget down the line. Don’t make the common mistake of trying to promote something that isn’t working in order to get it more traffic. Instead, hone in on what is working—earning the highest engagement, including shares and clicks—and put your money behind it.

You can approach content testing in two ways. First, as a business you should already be sending out updates every day. You can go through those updates and identify your best performing posts, then promote them. This is great for goals like driving traffic or driving brand awareness. For more specific goals, you may want to actually create new Twitter content with your campaign in mind, then run your organic tests. This will ensure your content is best suited for the goals you’ve set in step one.

3. Choose your target audience

In addition to your goals and your content, you need to have decided on your target audience in advance of building and launching your Twitter ad campaign. Many people will treat the audience the same as their Twitter following, but this is looking at things too simplistically.

Twitter ads offer a number of targeting options which give it a major edge over organic Tweeting. Core to social media advertising is your ability to hone in on a specific audience or customer persona and reach them through your campaigns.

When it comes to Twitter, you can target your ads based on location, gender, languages, interests and device. You can also upload lists of specific people, your email list for example, and target only the list with your ads.

Twitter Advertising Targeting Options.png

But Twitter targeting is especially valuable if you’re looking to target people based on their networks. Basically, if you have a coffee shop in Vancouver, the real strength of Twitter ads is that you can target audiences already following rival coffee shops in the city, or maybe those following big coffee brands like Foulger’s. You can also target people who are similar to your existing follower base, which is a great way to find people outside of your networks who fit your customer personas.

4. Build your ad

So you’ve established what you hope to achieve, who you’re going to target and what content you’re going to use; now you need to actually build your ad or ads.

Sign into the Twitter ads platform and insert your payment information. From there, actually building an ad is a fairly simple process, one largely based on filling out fields in a form. Start a new ad campaign, name it, choose your funding source and the start and end dates of the campaign.

From there, you’ll need to choose an objective from the list of six mentioned above. These six objectives can correspond to four different ad formats: Promoted Accounts, Promoted Trends, Promoted Tweets and Native Video.

  • Promoted Tweets are messages that will appear directly in the timelines of the Twitter users you targeted and at a specific time you have bid on.

  • A Promoted Account is an ad that invites targeted Twitter users to follow your brand – attracting more of the right followers to your brand faster.

  • Trending topics on Twitter are the most talked about subjects on the social network, appearing on the left side of the page. Promoted Trends allow you to put your story at the top of that list for 24-hours.

  • Native video ads are the newest of the bunch and will appear in timelines as well, autoplaying as people scroll over them.

Many campaigns will end up falling under the Promoted Tweets umbrella. For a first time Twitter ad user, this is the easiest, safest and cheapest option for you to start off with.

Once you’ve settled on your objective, choose the targeting options that you decided on in advance. Twitter will provide you with an estimated audience size if you want to adjust your targeting to reach more people.

Finally, build the actual ad as it will appear using the copy and media that you tested organically. Don’t go off-script; use the exact same message that worked with your followers. They’re not going to be exposed to your ad, so it will be fresh content for whoever sees it.

5. Set your budget and place your bid

The money stuff. It’s what scares most people off from trying Twitter ads at all. People who aren’t sure they understand how to use these ad tools, or whether they actually work, are understandably hesitant to allocate their budgets to them. The truth is, unlike with traditional advertising, you can test an ad on Twitter for about the same price as your lunch, so there’s really no reason to be afraid.

The budget section actually comes before building the actual ad, but it can get confusing so I’ve left it until the end. The cost of Twitter ads depends on the ad type you select and the audience you’re targeting. Promoted Tweets could cost you anywhere from 50 cents to 10 dollars or more per engagement (video view, link click, follow, etc.) based on how targeted your ad is. Promoted Trends cost way, way more.

You can set daily maximum as well as total campaign budgets. Twitter stops showing your ads once your budget has been reached, so that you don’t have to manually end campaigns to avoid being charged.

Ads on Twitter work on a bidding system. You set your bid for how much you’re willing to spend for a specific user action (website visit, retweet, etc.). Others will be placing competitive bids, but the most you’ll pay is one cent more than the next highest bid. Look at what other advertisers are bidding for similar ads—information Twitter provides—in order to get an idea of approximately how much to bid. Once you win your bid, your ads will immediately go into play. They’ll continue until your budget runs out.

The key to keeping your costs down? Testing your ads. Yes, you’ve tested the content organically, but you never know exactly how something will perform with your target audience. One of the great virtues of social ads is instant feedback. You can gauge the effectiveness of a sponsored post in minutes, and follow up with advanced analytics reports. With all this available data, you should be sending out several “test” ads to small audiences, tracking the results, and then pushing winning ads to larger groups. It’s cheaper and more effective. Twitter only charges you when a user completes the action set out in your campaign objective anyways, so all of these campaigns will provide some value.

6. Track your ad performance

Speaking of analytics reports, all advertisers should be tracking the performance of their Twitter ad campaigns, from start to finish. Many social media professionals or businesses take a nonchalant approach to tracking organic performance—they shouldn’t—but the importance of tracking is increased with money involved.

When you first launch your ads, check in every day to see how they’re performing. On a typical Promoted Tweet campaign, Twitter provides insight on:

  • Spend
  • Impressions
  • Link clicks
  • Costs-per-click
  • Click rate
  • Conversions

Check each of these metrics and ensure they’re meeting your targets. If, after a few days, your ad is exceeding the cost you expect per click or engagement, it may be time to pull it. If your impressions and click rate are low but your spend is high, you may want to rethink your audience targeting. If your conversions are low, consider changing the copy to emphasize your call to action.

Look at each performance indicator and consider how it reflects on your ad. With money involved, you just can’t sit around hoping for the best. Monitoring ad performance allows you to quickly react and adjust, to ensure you’re making the most of the money you spend.

7. Rotate your ads

You know during the Olympics, or during an election, when you see the same commercials over and over again? How frustrated you get with the same jingles? With television, you kept watching because you didn’t really have a choice. But on social media, people have far more control, and far less patience.

With that in mind, you should regularly be rotating your ads. Set reasonable time periods for your ads to run—often 3-5 days but definitely not exceeding a few weeks. This ensures that your old Twitter ad won’t continue to make the rounds for weeks on end, annoying people who happen to see it shared multiple times. It also ensures you that you’re staying current, promoting only the most recent, up-to-date and relevant content. This, in turn, should lead to better ad performance overall.

A Tweet we promoted to support our Amplify launch.

So there you have it. All the steps you need to take to launch your first Twitter Ad campaign. Go out there and experiment. Start with a small budget, proven content, and you have nothing to be afraid of. Then let us know if you have any more questions.

Learn more about social media advertising.

The post How to Launch Your First Twitter Ad Campaign appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.



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