How to use Twitter ads to promote your business

With the growth of Twitter in recent years, it’s increasingly difficult to stay on your followers’ timeline long enough for them to notice your tweets. With over 500 million users sending over 400 million tweets per day, it can feel like your messages are a needle in a haystack. How can you get more visibility for your account? One way to promote your business is through Twitter Ads. Read on to see how you can use Twitter Ads and what you can expect!

Companies can use events, local or national, that are happening now and that are relevant to their audience to promote products before, during and after the event. All sizes of brands and companies can join the conversation to highlight their products or services. Twitter users talk about the same things over and over again and follow the same predictable patterns when they talk on Twitter. With this information in mind, you can run Twitter ads that deliver the right content at the right time.

With Twitter Ads you can use:

• promoted account,

• promoted tweet,

• Promoted trend.

On desktop, all three ways to promote are displayed on screen, but more importantly, with 80% using mobile devices to access Twitter in the UK, the promoted account and tweet appear in the line of mobile time. From this account or promoted tweet, users can click to proceed with the button on the right side of the promotion. The promoted trend appears in the Discover tab.

Who will see your Twitter ads?

Twitter offers you the following targeting options:

• followers – users who already follow you,

• look-a-like: target users who are similar to your followers,

• interests: based on the interests of the users that are generated from their tweets and following,

• keywords: users speaking or searching words and hashtags they use,

• location: target by country, region or metropolitan area,

• device – segment by device or platform,

• gender,

• Custom Audiences: Those who have shown interest in your product or services outside of Twitter,

• TV: those who watch and talk about particular TV shows.

So if you’ve already built a large following on Twitter, you can use Twitter Ads to make sure your followers are aware of a certain message (promotion, new product, event, webinar) that you’re offering. If you want to grow your audience first, you can target specific users on Twitter based on the description of your ideal customer: location, gender, interests, who else they follow and like, what they watch and talk about, etc.

You can address the following steps in the marketing process with Twitter Ads:

• Generate awareness about your products or brand,

• Get more targeted followers,

• Generate greater engagement for your messages,

• Research which direct response messages and text resonate best with your followers,

• Increase website traffic,

• Generate new signups for your email list,

• Convert those visitors and listing signs into purchases of your products and services.

How can you advertise on Twitter?

I previously published a post on Lead Gen Cards showing how to set up an account to use Twitter Ads.

Once you’ve set up your account, you can use the following tools in your ad campaign:

• Promoted Accounts – To increase your Twitter following and to get people to know you,

• Lead Generation Cards – To build your email database,

• TV Conversation Targeting: To zoom in on users watching relevant shows,

• Custom Audience – Retarget your email list contacts and prospects from those who visit your website,

Promoted accounts on the timeline

• promoted accounts help you build an audience with every tweet you send,

• ads run on mobile and home timelines alongside a tweet,

• put a business or brand in front of people and give them a reason to stick around,

• simple to use: one button to click to follow, but users can also reply and retweet, so you won’t be charged as much,

• increase the engagement of your posts and your number of followers.

Lead Gen Cards: Promoted Tweets

• a card is an image, video, or other rich media, that runs alongside a tweet,

• interested users give you their email address with a simple click,

• the card can direct mobile leads to specific landing pages,

• Integrate with an existing CRM (Mailchimp, Salesforce, Infusionsoft, etc.) to capture leads and send automated follow-up messages.

Complete information on how to set up and use lead generation cards – read this post and watch a video tutorial.

Is working? Follow up with online conversion tracking.

• Tracking allows you to track the results of ad campaigns on Twitter,

• Reports offer a complete view of conversions,

• Use statistics to optimize campaigns for more effective conversions.

Online conversion tracking can show you how, and if, someone buys your product after seeing your ad, allowing you to modify ad campaigns to increase sales. You can also track conversions for email list opt-in, webinar registrations, social sharing, blog comments, depending on your campaign goal. With statistics at hand, you can decide which tweets and cards perform better than others and remove those that don’t generate enough response.