The complete guide to advertising on Twitter

Let’s face it: advertising organically on Twitter (or any social medium for that matter) is going to take a very long time to produce results. Why is this? Every day, across the globe, millions upon millions of social media users post hundreds of millions of adverts and other pieces of content. It’s simple for your message to become lost in the noise of constantly-updating content. This is where Twitter ads come in. They enhance the reach of your content, and can speed up the acquisition of leads substantially:

Types of Twitter adverts

The particular objectives that you set for your social media advertising campaigns will influence the format your ads will take:

• Promoted Tweets – these are just like regular Twitter updates, but instead of only showing the advert to a brand’s followers, it will be shown to a pre-determined group of Twitter users who won’t necessarily be existing followers.
• Promoted accounts – like the title suggests, this Twitter advert format is intended to promote the brand’s Twitter profile, and appears in a bar on the right-hand side of the screen under the title of ‘who to follow’.
• Promoted trends – underneath the ‘who to follow’ sidebar is a ‘trending’ section, where the most popular hashtags in the user’s general location are listed.
• Automated ads – Twitter Promote Mode is an automated advertising solution perfect for brands new to the social media ads environment. Here, Twitter automatically selects the ideal post, audience, and budget (you can cap this) – and runs ad campaigns on your behalf.

Six steps to advertising on Twitter

Leaping paid Twitter advertising? Here are seven steps that you need to be following to ensure you’re ticking all of the important boxes:

1. Twitter ads account setup

Start by logging into your Twitter account. Once done, navigate to ads.twitter.com, enter the country you live in, your time zone, then click on the ‘let’s go’ button. This will allow you access to Twitter’s advertising management platform. You can’t run ads on Twitter without this.

2. Choose your objectives

What are you hoping to achieve with your Twitter adverts? There are three objectives to choose from awareness, consideration, and conversion. Awareness is all about people seeing your ads, consideration is looking to garner engagement with ads, and conversions are about getting people to click through to a website, download an app, etc.

3. Set up ad groups & bidding

The ‘ad group setup’ page lets you set your campaign name, the start and end dates, the maximum budget allocated to the campaign, bidding type, and other parameters. Twitter allows for automated bidding, where the platform will set bids to get the best results for the lowest spend.

4. Target your audiences

Twitter, like other social media platforms, allows advertisers to drill down on the targeting of audiences seriously. You’ll start by defining your audience demographics (age, gender, location, language, etc.) and then move on to target ‘Audience features’ based on their interests.

5. Choose the ad placement

The penultimate Twitter ad campaign setup step involves deciding where your adverts are going to show up. You get to choose between ads showing on Users’ timelines, on profiles and Tweet detail pages, and in search results. You can choose one of these, all of them, or a combination.

6. Hit the green button

Once you’ve set up your ad campaign, making sure to double-check all of your details (especially the audience targeting criteria), all that is left to do is click on the button to schedule the ad campaign, and sit back while you let Twitter do its thing. Be sure to keep track of your advert performance throughout the campaign.

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