Digital Marketing 101: What You Need to Know About Twitter Ads

As a digital marketer, you’re offered a wide range of media platforms on which to advertise a business’ products or services.

Although paid advertising on traditional social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, and more recently Tik Tok, seems like an obvious choice, Twitter is actually a great advertising arena for you to demonstrate the value of your business and achieve marketing goals such as lead generation, brand awareness, driving sales, and more.

Let’s dive in.

What are Twitter Ads?

Twitter Ads are the perfect complement to an organic content strategy. The paid “tweet” ads you create in your campaigns will appear as either a promoted ad or follower ad. The ads you build are exposed to a broad audience of your choice.

Twitter is home to an audience of 353 million, globally ranked as 6th in the world for mobile apps, and expected to grow 2.4% in 2021. This is clear evidence to advertisers that Twitter, an app built for sharing news and trending topics, serves as an excellent marketing platform to achieve your business goals.

Twitter is a social media platform where users have the ability to follow trendings news on essentially everything through certain “tweets”. Tweets can contain links, photos, GIFs, or videos. But if you're tweeting text, you're limited to 280 characters.

Different Formats of Twitter Ads

As previously mentioned, there are a few different advertising options at your disposal when advertising campaigns with Twitter.

Promoted Tweets: These are identical to regular tweets that appear in your timeline, however are not organic. This means that an advertiser is paying for their place in your timelines, even if you don’t follow that account or trending topic.

Similar to a regular tweet, you can like, comment or retweet promoted tweets. You are able to identify if ads are paid, as they are clearly labeled in the bottom left corner.

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Promoted Tweets are displayed in the following placements:

• At the top of relevant search results pages on Twitter
• In search results for a Trend Takeover
• Your timeline
• Select user profiles that fit the targeting credentials configured for a campaign.
• Official Twitter clients

Promoted Accounts: This ad feature enables you to pay to sponsor your brand’s Twitter account. This helps companies grow the size of their following, as promoted accounts are displayed in potential followers’ timelines, who to follow suggestions, and search results.

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Promoted Trends: Twitter users have the option to explore topics that are trending; companies have the option to purchase a placement within this feature of the app.

A Promoted Trend will show as one of the first spots under the “Trends for you” section, both in the Explore tab and in the timeline.

When a Promoted Trend is clicked, they will see the top tweets for that topic with a promoted tweet from your brand located at the top.

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Promoted Moments: Moments are stories showcasing the very best of what’s happening on Twitter, to display to users what is popular and relevant. Advertisers have the option to bid on this placement.

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Campaign Objectives of Twitter Ads

Twitter’s advertising platform is very effective in successfully pairing the company's marketing objective with the right advertising campaign.

Twitter is a popular advertising alternative for media buying professionals as it enables companies from various sizes and industries to select campaigns to either build brand awareness, drive sales, or increase app installations.

Advertisers are gifted with the option to build campaigns with the following objectives:

• Awareness campaigns
• Consideration campaigns
• Conversion campaigns

For more detailed information, please refer here.

Audience Targeting With Twitter

Twitter employs highly advanced targeting features to display ads to the audience you want to reach. Similar to advertising on other social media goliaths such as Facebook, Twitter is able to exploit its mass amounts of data to target potential customers.

Twitter breaks down its targeting features by the following:

Demographics: Includes age, gender, location, language, and device.

Audience Features: Includes targeting certain trending conversations (topics), events, keywords, movies/tv shows, remarketing lists, and lookalike audiences.

Customer Lists: Includes targeting an audience based on how they interact with your website, tweets, or app.

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Benefits of Twitter Ads

Twitter serves as an excellent platform for advertisers to grow a business and achieve any and all marketing objectives. What separates Twitter from other traditional media platforms?

Pay for Performance: Advertising on Twitter provides a unique advantage in which you only pay when certain users take actions that you set up in your campaign.

If you’re running a promoted tweet for awareness, you are only charged when users engage with your tweet through a like, retweet, share, or comment.

If your campaign goal is to send traffic to the website, you’re only charged when users visit your website through a campaign on Twitter.

If your campaign goal is to increase app installations, you only get charged for when users download your app.

Essentially, Twitter is helping reduce wasted ad spend on poor-quality leads. This helps advertising on Twitter to be cost-efficient, and help deliver a healthy return on investment. Applying this cost structure to advertising campaigns helps pool quality leads to your brand’s marketing funnel.

Keyword Targeting: Twitter users are actively engaged in tweeting with specific keywords, or following trends or search terms that include a specific keyword.

When building an audience you want to target you are able to include these specific keywords in your campaign. This helps deliver your ads to users who have demonstrated high interest in these topics/keywords.

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Unique Audience Targeting: Being able to build custom audiences to target on Twitter helps advertisers increase their conversion rates by advertising to the right people at the right time.

Targeting people that follow certain accounts acts as a proven strategy to achieve campaign goals as your ads will be displayed to users who have demonstrated interest in products or services similar to your own.

Moreover, Twitter does offer remarketing targeting. With the ability to target users who interact with a certain tweet, you can drive users down the marketing funnel by sending the appropriate ads during their purchasing journey to increase conversion rates.

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Inexpensive Advertising: Due to the lack of advertising competition on Twitter, paid campaigns are fairly low compared to other social paid platforms. This helps result in a cheaper cost-per-click compared to other advertising options.

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Moreover, there is no minimum budget when advertising on Twitter. So if you have a smaller marketing budget Twitter enables anyone to advertise at any cost.

This opportunity provides advertisers with the opportunity to test campaigns to collect data and at a low cost.

Conclusion

If you’re looking at producing a holistic approach to your paid media strategy, Twitter is definitely a platform that should not be ignored.

The ability to build creative ads, target specific and high converting groups and inexpensive advertising solidifies Twitter as an excellent avenue for brands to achieve their marketing goals.

If you’re looking to advertise on Twitter, please contact TechWyse to help get you started, and bring your business to the top!