Twitter has recently launched its advertising system in the UK. I’m excited about this for many reasons and I’ll include some below. But for a start, let’s quickly look at how to set up Twitter advertising:
1. Promoted Account or Tweets?
You have two options for advertising on Twitter, you can promote your tweets (and only pay if someone clicks, retweets, replies, favourites or follows.) You can also promote your account to grow your follower base:
In this example we’re going to look at Promoting Your Account.
2. Set Up
So I’m not going to waste time talking about the obvious options such as when to run your ad campaign but let’s look at the targeting options:
Add @usernames
This option allows you to target users with similar interests to followers of any account you add. So if you added @mattcutts (Chief of Webspam at Google) to this option you’d target users with similar interests to Matts followers. In this case, thats an estimated audience size of 251,000 users worldwide on Twitter. I know followers of Matt Cutts are likely to be webmasters, or online marketing folks so I may want to target these guys as they are likely to be relevant to the type of posts I make hence more likely to engage with me (which includes sharing my content.)
I want to target the UK so I’ll add that to location targeting and I’ll add SEO & Advertising to the interests categories to help target users that are as relevant as possible.
So that’s now 27,000 people in the UK I’m targeting for my Twitter Promoted Account Campaign.
Budgets
I’m going to start of small and do £10 a day and as per Twitters recommendation I’m going to bid £3 per follower (I will pay less than this.)
3. The Results
So here’s my campaign after running for about 10 days. I pretty much spent the daily budget most days and ended up with 95 new followers that I know are relevant to my interests and the posts I make. My Promoted Account advert appeared nearly 55,000 times (Impressions) and I received a follow rate of 0.17% which I’d say is probably fairly typical.
In this example I did target a few other Twitter handles including influential people in my industry and some competitors. By going to the @ Handles section of your report you can see which Twitter account resulted in follows and the follow rate for each along with other metrics such as cost per follower and impressions.
What I like about his report is that I can take a look at which account generated the best results, such as lowest cost per follower and highest follow rate. In my case there was a couple of clear losers that cost me relatively more per follower and gave me less bang for my buck, so I may want to exclude these Twitter handles next time unless of course they prove to be the type of followers that I really want.
A quick look through my new followers revealed a cross section of new followers ranging from small accounts with a couple of hundred followers to many thousands. Some of them appear to be irrelevant to my targeting at first glance but the majority are pretty good. Even more importantly I’m already seeing these new followers interacting with my posts which is precisely the point.
Using Twitter (or Social Media) Advertising Can Help Content Driven SEO.
When we create great content on our websites the best result we can wish for is for this content to strike a chord with visitors who engage with it which ultimately help us obtain new customers. The great thing about Social Media Advertising is, as displayed above, we can help the process along by ensuring we have a relevant audience on Social Media that is likely going to enjoy our content and share it which in turn helps increase our reach and the potential to earn natural backlinks.
Social Media for businesses isn’t just about having the most followers, It’s about having relevant followers that engage with your brand. Social Media advertising such as Twitter Ads allows you to increase your relevant followers by targeting those that are likely to interact with you which in turn helps your brand grow.
But, a few words of caution: Most Social Media users do not go online to be sold at. Whilst conveying your sales messages is of course important, it should be balanced out by relevant tweets that encourage conversation. If you’ve got the button pushed to broadcast and not conversation then you’ll likely be disappointed with results.
