An Insider’s Guide to Increasing followers, gaining website traffic, and much more with Twitter advertising

Last week we showed you all the basic elements of setting up and using Twitter.

Now that we’ve looked at how you can market locally with hashtags and how to set up your profile and start tweeting, we’re going to review how you make use of the paid side of Twitter to help grow your business online.

Why use Twitter Advertising?

Twitter ads are a great way to really expand your business reach and get your content in front of your ideal target market.

Twitter has enticed business owners into taking the plunge by making their platform one of the best of the majors when it comes to targeting the right users.

There was a time when Twitter offered much better organic reach as most social media giants have.

They did this to gain market advantage; however, once their user base was established, they monetised their platform by restricting the organic reach, forcing users to make use of their paid option.

So by selected the right interests, key phrases, and demographics you have a very low-cost per click method of reaching qualified leads.

How to Set Up Twitter Advertising

Let’s run through the steps in setting up an ad on Twitter.

First post and schedule your regular tweets and then begin your campaign creation after since your tweets are what you’ll be using in the promotional campaign.

After logging in Twitter click on your profile photo and:

1. Select Twitter Ads

2. At the top right you can see where it says

Create Campaign

3. Select Create Campaign

4. Now you can pick which kind of paid

campaign you’d like to try.

5. If you’re building up your Twitter account

try the Followers campaign type.

If you’re looking to drive people towards

your site and you have the content to

reflect that then select Website clicks or

conversions.

6. There are other options for more advanced

users such as video promotion and app

promotion but we’re going to stick with the

most used options noted above.

7. Once you’ve made your selection, you’ll see

your campaign budget information.

8. Pay close attention to this. Twitter (like

most social giants) tends to assume we all

have money to burn and will have some big

numbers pre-filled. I believe the current

pre-filled number is a daily budget of

$127.50.

Set yours to something much lower while you

test Twitter Ads out. I suggest $5 a day

and a total budget of $25 for a one work-

week campaign.

9. Next select your Date Range. Twitter tends

to auto-populate this with about a month

timeline. For your first trial let’s stick

with a 5-day work week as noted above.

10. After you click through you’ll get to

select your "creatives". These are the

tweets you’ve posted that will be used for

your campaign.

11. Select the tweets you posted with the

intent of either driving users towards

content or your website.

12. Now you get to set up the targeting.

13. When targeting get as specific as you can

with what you want in your preferred

audience. As stated in point 12, you should

select targeting parameters that align with

the original intention of your tweet.

14. Pick locations where you know your content

will resonate with users. If you deal

locally then promote locally.

15. Pick the gender of the preferred audience

for your campaign.

16. In the bottom field, you want to spend most

of your time.

Pick interests and key phrases that best

identify your preferred audience.

If your business sells doorknobs then type

in doorknobs to start your search. Find

interests related to doors. Select any key

phrase you know to be relevant to your

content on Twitter regarding the sale of

doorknobs.

17. You want to align your audience target with

your actual target for the content. If your

tweets direct back to your site then be

general about your business. Ads targeting

a blog or video should be targeted at users

who have expressed interest in that precise

niche.

To continue with our established analogy

this could mean targeting users interested

in brass door handles because you have

content you’re promoting that is

specifically about brass door handles.

18. Now click next and you’ll be taken to your

ad group bid. If running a lot of ad groups

with separate purposes you can set new ad

group budget totals here. For now you can

leave this as is.

The second option for target bid vs.

automatic bid is more advanced and doesn’t

really factor into the success much.

Leaving it as Automatic bid is fine.

19. Now click next and you’re ready to launch!

Use Your Twitter Advertising Metrics for Future Campaigns

Once the campaign has completed its run you can review the performance in this same Twitter ads section.

Look at Impressions but more so Clicks and your Cost Per Click. With Twitter it’s normally very low compared to other services.

If you want to peak at the performance even further please get in touch with us as we can analyse the data and make suggestions to help future campaigns perform better for you.