Afraid to step into a new social media space as part of your paid media strategy ? Don’t be! Twitter offers a massive reach, with many more audience and ad options than you might expect.
Considering that Twitter has 450 million active monthly users, it’s a space you don’t want to miss out on. Additionally, with stats like a 82% lift in ad recall and a 18% lift in brand awareness , Twitter is not just a large audience, but an engaged one.
Are you ready to take your digital marketing advertising to the next level?
Read on for Unfair Advantage’s Twitter marketing tips for success, as well as a few compelling Twitter case studies.
How Does Twitter Advertising Work?
To state it simply – very similarly to all social media advertising channels. However, our team actually hails Twitter Ads as one of our favorite social media ad interfaces – let us tell you why.
- Campaign, Ad Group, Ad account structure – we love granularity here at Unfair Advantage, so the detailed structure of ads within ad groups within campaigns is speaking our love language
- Multiple campaign objectives align with your business level goal(s)
- Large audience reach, with detailed audience segmentation available – hint: keyword targeting! In social media!
- Various ad types to align best with your target audience and campaign objective
- Simple site pixel installation and goal tracking
What Strategies Work Best In Twitter Ads?
Account Structure
As mentioned above, Twitter Ads follows a Campaign-Ad Group-Ad account structure. However, the tactics within that structure are not exactly what you’d expect. Typically, we at Unfair Advantage structure our accounts as granularly as possible. For example, each ad group has its own unique audience in social, or tight set of keywords in search. In Twitter, an all-in-one strategy is preferred – meaning you have one ad group containing all your audience targets within it. Scary right? But don’t worry, we always take a “trust but verify” approach – so of course we tested this theory. To our shock, the all-in-one ad group outperformed our granular audience-per-ad group strategy. Twitter’s algorithm truly does a good job of optimizing across your audience segments – and thus, we have moved forward with the one ad group per campaign strategy and have continued to see great results for our clients. In terms of campaign objectives, Twitter also has a wide range of options to align with your business level goal – including Reach, Engagement, Followers, Video Views, App Installs, Website Traffic, and Conversions. One which is specifically helpful when growing your brand is the follower campaign – this is something that is not available in campaigns for Instagram for example, so this really sets Twitter apart in the social media space. Afraid you won’t get audience level insights with the above approach? Not to worry. Twitter has an audience reporting section within the platform that will still provide detailed audience-level performance!
Audience Targeting
The audiences available on Twitter Ads are probably the biggest “it factor” this channel has to offer. See below to understand why. Follower Lookalikes – you can target lookalikes of basically any account on Twitter, regardless of the accounts follower size. This gives you tons of great opportunities to target not only your audience lookalikes, but also those of your competitors, as well as relevant accounts in your industry.
Keyword targeting – this is probably the coolest thing about Twitter Ads as most social media targets can’t get this granular. In Twitter, you can target keywords used across the platform to find users relevant to your industry/offering. Pro tip: add your relevant keywords as hashtags as well, to increase the potential reach of your audience.
There are also standard interest targets, demographic targeting, conversation targeting (think threads on world news, tv show discussions, etc.), as well as custom audiences available based on your website traffic and customer list uploads.
Twitter really has a targeting option for everyone – so don’t be afraid you can’t find your niche!
Twitter Ad Formats
As with most social media platforms, your ad visuals will have a large impact on performance for your campaigns. Luckily, Twitter has several options to ensure you can make the biggest impact on users.- For brand awareness/engagement:
- Image & Video Ads
- Follower ads – featuring a “follow” CTA button
- Polls
- For action driven campaigns:
- Website Cards (image/video ads leading to a URL)
- App cards
- Carousel
One thing very specific to Twitter is ad text – you want to keep it as short and sweet as possible. While the max character limit is 280, you really want to keep your text within 150 characters or less when possible. People are looking for instant updates via Twitter, so your ads need to fit within that mold.
Optimizations & Testing
As we’ve outlined above, advertising on Twitter is a great channel to test because of its many various audiences and strong creative options. The key to this platform is to start with a large set of highly targeted audiences and refine/expand as needed. Remember, you are launching everything in one ad group so don’t worry about the setup of having “too many audiences” – set up in Twitter is a breeze, one of the reasons we love it so much! Add as many relevant audiences as you can, start running your ads and collecting data, plan an analysis 2-4 weeks post launch to review audience level performance. Anything underperforming? Remove it. Anything doing great? Look for similar audiences to expand into. In terms of picking an ad type – go with what aligns to your goal, as outlined above. If you are looking to grow channel engagement/followers – follower ads are a great fit for you. If you are trying to increase newsletter sign-ups on your site, you’ll want to make sure you use a website card going to the sign-up page. It sounds relatively simple, but the key is test-refine-test again-refine again, and so on. Anyone can launch ads in Twitter using the above as a basic guideline, and furthermore can see success running in Twitter. Don’t just take our word for it – you know we have the data to back it up – see below for some Unfair Advantage client case studies!What Kind of Results Have We Seen With Twitter Ads?
Case Study #1: Follower Growth in First Two Months of Engagement With Aerospace Client
Case Study #2: Newsletter Sign-Up Growth For Thought Leadership Client
