Getting the ROI Out of Twitter’s Social Advertising

As of this week, Twitter has opened up advertising to U.S. users (it was by invite only previously). Twitter first introduced advertising options in 2010, and has been expanding advertising on the social network ever since. Most recently, Twitter opened its advertising API to third parties, which will let larger advertisers create more sophisticated campaigns on Twitter. The company launched that program with five partners: Adobe, Hootsuite, Salesforce, SHIFT and TBG Digital.

That being said, we thought it would be helpful to provide some best practices to make the most out of your next campaign:

1. Focus: Keep your messaging focused; be brief, interesting and to the point. In other words, make a solid value proposition and provide a link (at the end of the tweet).
2. 120 Characters: Try not to use all 140 characters of the tweet so that if followers re-tweet it, your link is less likely to get cut off.
3. Limit to 1 #Hashtag: Only use one #hashtag per tweet and make it consistent across the campaign; this allows twitter users who click on the #hashtag to see a cohesive existing conversation and to show that you own it.
4. Expand Geo-Targeting: Do NOT limit your targeting geographically if you can help it (especially when targeting your existing followers). You don’t want to limit your target audience too much when it comes to your fans or you may hinder your campaign’s ability to really get off the ground and generate buzz and/or traffic. (When targeting “users like my followers” it can be more appropriate to consider limiting the audience).
5. Finesse Your Bidding: when it comes to bidding, play around a lot in the set up screen before locking in your bid for that target group. For some reason, Twitter’s platform will occasionally increase your reach if you lower your bid or decrease your reach if you raise it.
6. Align Your Daily Dudget to Your Bids: If you are bidding conservatively (between $0.50 to $1.50) then you can un-limit your daily spend and not worry about burning through your campaign budget. This will bring you decent and consistent coverage. If you bid aggressively ($10 to $20) be sure to limit your daily spend or you will use up your budget rapidly. When you bid aggressively, you will see quick spikes in activity because your sponsored tweet will be served a lot. Unfortunately, you will use up your daily budget rapidly and then your sponsored tweet is dead in the water until you add more budget or until the next day’s spend is available.
7. Continually Assign Tweets Using Measurement: determine which tweets get spend manually and keep adding more. Within each ad group targeting different users, you can (and should) select which tweets are eligible to be served to that target group. As you’re adding more tweets to the campaign, include all of them as eligible to be served. Twitter’s platform will automatically serve the tweets that are most popular/successful more frequently. Twitter’s analytics will break out which tweets are doing the best for you and you can then learn and adjust your tweet copy to improve your campaign’s performance overall.

Bonus! Twitter Keyword Targeting – The Anatomy of Real Time Marketing

If you’re interested in learning more about Twitter advertising strategies and measurement, contact us and we’d be more than happy to walk you through the new feature and discuss the potential opportunities for your brand – no obligation!

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