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. This will open a new tab that looks like this:
3. At the top right you can see where it says Create Campaign
4. Select Create Campaign
5. Now you can pick which kind of paid campaign you’d like to try.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Once you’ve made your selection, you’ll see your campaign budget information.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. Select the tweets you posted with the intent of either driving users towards content or your website.
13. Now you’ll get to start targeting.
14. 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.
15. Pick locations where you know your content will resonate with users. If you deal locally then promote locally.
16. Pick the gender of the preferred audience for your campaign.
17. 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.

18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.

Thanks for reading,

P.S. If you found this article helpful, please share it with your Twitter followers:

About the Author, Mark Hare

Mark has been working in search engine optimization, paid online advertising, content marketing, and usability since 2005.

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He has worked with hundreds of clients on a wide range of web based projects and is a strong proponent of white hat SEO techniques and link earning over building.