Twitter Advertising: How to Use Promoted Tweets, Profiles, and Trends to Drive Traffic

With Twitter’s decision to slash the price of its promoted Tweets, it means you need to start weighing the pros and cons of a Twitter advertising campaign. If there are more benefits, you need to learn the best practices of Twitter advertising.

Twitter advertising: 3 pros and 3 cons

There can be many benefits associated with Twitter advertising:

More economical than other options. With so much competition for certain keywords on Google advertising, some terms can cost advertisers as much as $200 per click. Twitter won’t always be less expensive, but it is important to run a comparison because there is less competition on this relatively new platform.
Drive traffic to your website. You are able to decide who will see your ads on Twitter – you can have your tweets show up when people search for certain keywords; you can have your tweets show up in the timelines of certain users; and your tweets will appear at the top of your profile. When you target users based on interests or behavior, you are able to customize what they see when they land on your website when they arrive.
Build your audience. You can choose to attract new followers instead of trying to immediately drive traffic to your website.This builds a targeted audience you can market to in the future.

There are many benefits of Twitter advertising, but it is a new medium and there are some drawbacks:

Support. Unless you are a large organization, you may have trouble getting access to account representatives. Unless you have a dedicated advertising team, this could put you at a disadvantage – it will require vigilance to run a successful Twitter campaign.
Tracking. Don’t expect Google-level detail in tracking and reporting from Twitter. As a new service, the tracking is not advanced when compared to Google or Facebook and you will have to take a lot of responsibility on yourself.
Campaign specifics. On other paid advertising platforms, like Google and Facebook, its fairly easy to set campaign parameters, like day of the week. Selecting day of the week or managing bids during peak hours will require a lot of work on your part and, again, will require a lot of vigilance on your part.

You need to consider the above pros and cons of Twitter advertising to determine if it will be a worthwhile endeavor for your business. If you think using promoted tweets, profiles, and trends will benefit your business, you need to know some best practices. The next thing you need to do is decide what to promote, how to promote it, and how much you will spend and how long you will promote your campaign.

What to promote

Before you decide what you want to promote on Twitter, you need to decide your campaign’s goals:

Do you want to increase the number of Twitter followers you have?
Do you want to drive traffic to a special offer or new product?
Do you want to attempt to create a trend on Twitter?

If you want to increase your number of followers on Twitter, you should consider promoting your Twitter profile. To maximize the potential impact of your social media marketing efforts, it is essential that you have as many followers as possible. Increasing your followers doesn’t only help to increase your personal following, but it expands your reach – the number of people in your network’s extended circle of influence. Finally, some people belief that you have more credibility if you have more followers – this will help improve how credible you appear to be.

If you want to drive traffic to a new product or a special offering, you should consider promoting individual tweets. Promoted tweets will show up at the top of related searches, in users’ Twitter feed when relevant, in official Twitter clients, and in third-party clients, like Hootsuite. These are great ways to drive traffic, but it may not provide sustainable, long-term traffic that promoting your profile and growing your Twitter fanbase can.

You can become a trend on Twitter by paying for a promoted trend, but, be warned, this is expensive. This requires direct contact with Twitter, but, if it’s financially feasible, your trend will be visible to all Twitter users.

How to promote a profile

Decisions around how to promote yourself on Twitter depend on what you choose to promote.

If you decided to promote an account to build your following, you simply indicate the interests of users you want to target. It’s easiest to use the keywords you’ve decided to target as part of your marketing campaign and your account will automatically be recommended to people with those interests.

How to promote a tweet

If you decided to promote a specific tweet (or tweets) because your goal is to drive traffic to your website, there are three ways to promote your tweet from which you can choose:

Have your tweet appear in search results. Promoting your tweet with this method has your message appear in search results when people are using a particular keyword. This method works like Google AdWords where the highest bidder shows up at the top – you can choose from as many keywords as you like.
Have your tweet appear in people’s timelines. If you want to promote your tweet in people’s timelines, you need to determine whether you want it to show up in your current follower’s timelines or the timelines of people who do not follow you, but are like your current followers.
Have your tweet appear at the top of your profile. This option will have whatever tweet you choose to promote show up at the top of your profile page. That way, whenever someone visits your profile page they will see your promoted tweet.

2 ways Twitter advertising lets you target

There are two ways Twitter lets you target your ads:

The geographic location of the user that will see your tweet – you can choose anywhere in the world, in specific countries or in specific US metropolitan areas.
You can also decide which devices will see your tweet – desktop devices, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and other devices. If your website isn’t formatted for mobile devices, be sure to exclude them from your list.

3 kinds of tweets to promote

You know what to promote, how to promote, and how you’re going to target your Twitter advertising, but you must carefully select the proper tweets to ensure you get the best return on investment for your Twitter advertising dollars. If you decide to promote tweets, here are the three kinds you should focus on promoting:

Lead generation: If you need to fill up your sales funnel, you should consider promoting tweets that drive people to a special offer on your website.
Events: Promote tweets that are talking about an upcoming event and that provide a link to your registration page.
Most popular: If you are looking for more blog readers, find your most popular tweets and promote those beyond your current network.

How much to spend

Finally, you need to decide how much money you are going to spend on your Twitter advertising campaign and how long the campaign will run. You need to decide on the:

Campaign’s start and end date
The campaign’s total cost
The campaign’s daily cost
Your maximum bid
What you want to call your campaign

These are the steps you can follow to ensure you succeed on Twitter by finding more followers, generating more web traffic and filling your sales funnel.

Have you tried Twitter advertising? What were some the challenges you faced?