by 
Are you interested in learning more about advertising on Twitter?
Have you followed the latest on Twitter ads?
Twitter has many paid options to help you gain more exposure.
Keep reading to discover three ways to use Twitter ads to grow your business.
Why Twitter Advertising?
When Twitter released their advertising platforms, there was a huge lack of functionality when it came to targeting your ads toward specific audiences.
While it's still not as detailed as Facebook or LinkedIn advertising, Twitter has come a long way in making sure your advertising reaches the right audience.
In this post, we're going to look at how to create a high-performance Twitter ad campaign for your business.
#1: Gain Visibility With Promoted Tweets
One of the most popular uses of Twitter advertising is to promote a specific message (tweet) on Twitter. For example, if you search Twitter for a particular keyword, you're likely to see a promoted tweet at the top of search results.
This can be a great way to get a specific message about your products and services at the top of your potential customers' Twitter feed. It can also be used to promote engaging content created by your business to boost authority in your industry.
To promote a tweet, you need to go to the Twitter advertising section and sign in with your usual Twitter username and password. If it's your first time there, you'll be asked to select your country and time zone.
Twitter advertising is currently available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland. For those who have used Twitter advertising before, you can click the New Campaign button to start a new advertising campaign.
National brands and advertising agencies in 18 other countries including Australia, Brazil, France and Italy can fill out a form to speak with an advertising specialist.
Next, choose New Promoted Tweets Campaign. Then you'll answer a series of setup questions about your campaign, starting with the campaign name and duration.
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Next, fill out your targeting options. You can choose to target users based on keywords that users search or tweet about, television programming they engage with (such as people who tweet about the top-tweeted show, Scandal) and interests. Interest-based targeting allows you to target people similar to the followers of any Twitter username you enter, meaning you could target ads toward your competitor's followers.
Note that of these three options—keywords, television and interests—only keyword ad targeting allows your tweet to appear in search results when someone searches for a particular keyword. Other ad targeting options will only show on users' timelines.
In addition to the above targeting options, you can target your ads toward people in specific locations down to a city/metro level within the United States. You can also target by user device and gender.
Once your targeting is set, you can choose to manually select the tweets you want to promote or allow Twitter to choose the five most engaging recent tweets. If you are trying to achieve specific goals, such as advertising your latest product launch, it's best to compose a custom tweet about the launch using the Promote a New Tweet option.
Finally, set your total budget, daily maximum and maximum bid amount per engagement. While you can choose to bid lower than the amount suggested by Twitter, you may lose out on exposure if someone outbids you on the same targeting options.
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If you're new to Twitter advertising, you'll need to enter a method of payment. Otherwise, save your campaign, which will go live upon approval by the Twitter advertising team.
#2: Grow Followers With Promoted Accounts
The next thing you can do with Twitter advertising is grow your followers with promoted accounts. You can see promoted accounts in various areas across Twitter, such as in the Who to Follow box in the left-hand sidebar.
This is a great way to increase the targeted followers of your Twitter account quickly, especially if you are new to Twitter or simply want to expand your audience.
The setup for promoted accounts is similar to the process for promoted tweets. Targeting options are limited to reaching users who are similar to a particular Twitter user's followers (such as your competitor's) and reaching users with specific interest categories.
You can also choose a tweet from your account that will be shown on mobile devices next to the suggestion to follow you. The tweet should be something that gives your potential new follower a reason to follow your account.
The budgeting options are also similar—you set a total budget, daily maximum and bid per follower. Suggested bid amounts vary based on the targeting options you set, but can range from $2 to $3 per follower. This is why you have to be extremely picky about your targeting so you only pay for followers who are good for your business.
#3: Increase Leads With Lead Generation Cards
The best addition to Twitter advertising is lead generation cards. These are tweets that allow businesses to collect names and emails of potential leads for their business or mailing list subscribers directly on Twitter. You can see how it works by clicking on the cards.twitter.com link in this tweet from ExactTarget.
Tip Tuesday: 140 Mobile Marketing Tips all in 140 Characters or Less: https://t.co/O9exCPKUgG
— ExactTarget (@ExactTarget) December 17, 2013
You can find out how to set up lead generation cards in this post by John Bonini. It's a great way to really get tangible, measurable ROI from your Twitter advertising.
Twitter Advertising Tips
To get the most out of any Twitter advertising campaign, be sure to use these three tips.
- Target your ad campaigns precisely. With bid amounts between $1.50 for promoted tweet engagements and $3 per follower, it pays to have a smaller but targeted reach.
- Use UTM parameters for any links shared in promoted tweets. These are tags that you add to a target URL in your tweet that will identify visitors who click on that specific link in Google Analytics using the parameters you set. With UTM parameters, you're able to isolate traffic that clicked specifically on that promoted tweet. Use the Google Analytics URL Builder to easily craft your UTM parameters, and find the data for your campaigns under Acquisitions > Campaigns in Google Analytics.
- Set up conversion tracking within the Twitter advertising dashboard as another way to measure your ROI for Twitter advertising campaigns. You can find it by clicking on the Conversion Tracking link in the menu bar of your Twitter advertising dashboard.
Over to You
As you can see, Twitter now gives you more options to reach your audience and helps you to create the Twitter ad campaigns you need for your business.
What do you think? What have your results been using the new Twitter advertising targeting and lead generation options? Please share in the comments!
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