Most marketing professionals have launched or encountered a Facebook ad, but a Twitter ad? Not so much. In general, social media is a valuable and potent marketing tool. Even more so during the current global pandemic.
Why? People are spending more time on their phones than ever before, be it to communicate with loved ones, attend zoom meetings, order groceries or browse the latest fashion trends.
While many businesses are already reaping the benefits of social media marketing, others have yet to get it right.
We’ve found that when considering social media marketing, businesses think of Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn first. While a Twitter ad is often neglected – but we’d like to highlight how it can be an amazing platform for some businesses.
What is Twitter, and Who Uses It?
Twitter is a social media platform and microblogging service. According to statistics from the first quarter of 2021, there are about 199 million active users.
Twitter is used to ‘tweet’ about anything that’s on your mind as well as discovers news, current events, trends, or public figures. Twitter, unlike the majority of social media platforms, shifts the focus away from you, and instead focuses on what is happening around the world.
Twitter users are not your run-of-the-mill social media user. A large chunk of Twitter users are 18 to 49-year-olds with either a diploma or certificate. They also tend to live in the city and earn higher salaries than users of other social networks. If this sounds like your target market, you might want to consider advertising your business on Twitter.
How to Target Different Audiences on Twitter
There’s a lot of advertising potential on a platform of close to 200 million active users. There are several options to choose from to build your target audience on Twitter. Let’s take a look.
Retargeting Past Engagements From Old Tweets
Retargeting past Tweet engagements for Organic and Paid Tweets allows you to retarget everyone who has interacted with you in the past, or target a new audience with an old campaign or post.
Expanding Your Followers
You can directly retarget your Twitter followers or use users suggested by Twitter to expand your audience.
Current Hot Topics and Events
You can use this option on Twitter to target events, granted people are talking about it.
Tailored Audiences and Exclusions
This option allows you to use uploads, such as an email list, to build a custom audience on Twitter
Adding Twitter to Your Marketing Strategy: How To Create An Audience
If you have a very clear idea of your target audience, you can start creating fine-tuned audiences on Twitter using keywords, interests, events as well as population characteristics like age and gender. Alternatively, Twitter’s recommendations are generated based on your topic and can help you expand your audience if you’re feeling stuck.
Setting Up Your Campaign Structure and Utilizing Creative
These are the current Twitter’s advertising campaign objectives you can choose from:
- App installations
- Engagements
- Followers
- App re-engagements
- Website clicks
- Reach
- Pre-roll views
- Video views
Choosing the right option from this list when setting up your campaigns is a step toward successfully advertising on Twitter. Best practices for Twitter ad campaign setup, in our experience, is 1 campaign, 1 ad group, and 1 ad. We find that this strategy works because results are data-driven: if you are delivering on each audience and ad placement and as a result, driving data, you will see results.
If you combine audiences and ads, it’s harder to differentiate which is performing well for you. In terms of Creative, there are two types of ad formats that can be used: Tweets and Cards. Standard text ads, as well as Cards, are launched as Tweets. Twitter Card formats can be a gif, image, video, or carousel.
To drive digital marketing results, Twitter ads should have a clear ‘Call To Action’ and landing page.
Conclusion – Advertising Your Business on Twitter
We hope that this article will help you to start creating massively successful Twitter ads that reach your ideal audience.
Remember to choose an objective that matches what you’re trying to achieve on the platform, consider how you can use its targeting features to reach your ideal audience, and always consider the intent of the platform in relation to your advertising strategy.
Twitter can be an amazing platform for creating thought leadership or just engaging with your customer base on relevant topics – it’s up to you how you want to use it.
If you enjoyed this article or found it helpful, check out more e-commerce marketing content on the inSyte blog or listen to the inSyte Podcast.
This article was brought to you by Syte. We’re a specialist e-commerce and lead generation digital marketing agency dedicated to driving up your bottom line.
If you need any help running or optimising your business’ Twitter ads, feel free to reach out with the form below or check out our case studies page to see what we’ve been able to do for our clients.
