In our last article about social media from August 2015 we introduced you to the benefits of social media platforms to spread your brand. We explained how to get started with Facebook advertising and create your first campaign. In this article we want to introduce you to Twitter advertising. Since April 2013, Twitter advertising offers to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) the possibility to advertise in their platform and reach their 302 million users (May 2015). They started in United States and have been expanding the reach to more than 200 countries nowadays. Through a self-service ads platform similar to Facebook’s one, you will be able to create your campaigns and in this article we will show you how!
The first thing to do in order to start your first campaign is to create an account in Twitter. Just go to twitter.com and follow the steps to signup. Once your account is ready to use, you can get started with the first advertising campaign.
Click in the “profile & settings” button, choose Twitter Ads and you’ll be redirected to the advertising dashboard. When clicking in the “Create new campaign” you will have to choose the objective of the campaign:
- Followers: Grow your community on Twitter
- Website clicks or conversions: Send people to your site (to purchase, sign up, etc.).
- Tweet engagements: Reach more people and drive conversation.
- App installs or re-engagements: Get people to install or re-engage with your mobile app.
- Leads on Twitter: Collect emails from people who express interest in your business.
- Video views: Get people to watch your videos using twitter’s native video player.
- Custom: Create a custom campaign using the old Promoted Tweets from.
In this example we are going to use the website clicks or conversions.
1st STEP: Setup your campaign
Name your campaign, set start and end dates of the campaign or run continuously, and decide if you want to use a conversion tag. If you implement the twitter conversion tag, you will track the conversions in Twitter every time there is a conversion.
2nd STEP: Select your audience
In this step you need to select the target audience filtering by location, gender, language and device. Additionally, twitter offers additional audience features:
- Keywords
- Followers
- Interests
- Tailored audiences
- TV targeting
- Behaviors
- Event targeting
The goal is to combine all this filters in order to create segments of users who will be interested in your products/services.
3rd STEP: Set your budget
You have to decide what is the maximum amount you want to spend per day and optionally the total budget for the campaign. We recommend to start with a limited budget such as 50 US$ per day.
4th STEP: Choose your creative
In this step you will compose the ad that is going to be displayed to the users. You have to write a 140 characters tweet, add a URL (landing page where users will be redirected after clicking the ad), add an image, a 70 characters headline and a call to action button.
Once your ad is live and running, you will be able to see the performance in the campaigns dashboard. Keep a close eye to the stats the first days and fine tune the different targeting option to optimize your campaign!