How to Run a Successful Twitter Ad Campaign

Running a successful Twitter Ad Campaign will see your money, and time, spent as wisely as possible. It’s so easy to create a bad ad campaign that you think will help you grow your business, but instead only helps you throw money out the virtual window!

You need to take the time to create a Twitter Ad Campaign that will be successful. Twitter can’t do it for you, they merely provide the platform. You have to provide the content, and do the research on your audience, all by yourself. Let’s get to work!

The groundwork: Your goals for your Ad Campaign

You’re going to be able to plan your ad campaign the best by looking at your current audience and establishing goals around them. They’ll help you pick out the right Twitter accounts to target, the right Ad Campaign to use, and the right time to do all of this at.

There are three basic kinds of Ad Campaigns, with a fourth in beta:

• Promoted tweets: Your tweets appear in the target audience’s Timeline.
• Promoted accounts: Your account shows up in the target audience’s suggested accounts section.
• Promoted trends: Your hashtags and trends show up in the target audience’s trends and hashtags box.
• Objective based: You choose your goal of having a certain number of followers, website clicks, engagements, app installs, or leads.

As you can see, each Ad Campaign is going to give you different results. You need to look at your audience and establish where it is you want it to grow. Here is what you can expect from each one:

• Promoted Tweets: You will make one piece of content popular. Great for clicks to your website, better when done with a promotion or sale.
• Promoted Accounts: Find new followers and grow your audience.
• Promoted Trends: Get that hashtag trending for long-term engagement in comparison to a Promoted tweet.
• Objective based: Geared to helping you reach certain goals, ongoing until your goals are met.

Before you start anything, know what it is you want to do. Wanting more followers, but using a Promoted trend, may not get you what you’re after. Use a Promoted account ad instead. Just blindly saying “I want to have a better Twitter account!” will likely get you nowhere at all.

Look closer at your target audience: What do they like?

To take looking at your audience further, you need to plan for the content you’ll be sharing during your Twitter Ad Campaign. This applies quite obviously to Promoted Tweets, but the content you’re sharing during a Promoted Accounts or Trends campaign is equally important.

How you’ll research this is through your Twitter Analytics. Look at your goals from above. Are you:

• Trying to get more clicks? Research what content did best in the past.
• Trying to get more retweets? Research which tweets were retweeted the most often.
• Trying to get more followers? Research what you were sharing during your last follower spike.

Let your data guide the content you create based on your goals. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on your Ad Campaign, everything on Twitter comes down to creating the right content.

Reach viral numbers with a push

You can’t just sit back and expect everything to happen for you. Twitter isn’t going to wave a magic wand and make you successful, you still need to push to make your goals happen. Some ideas to try include:

• Using clear calls to action associated with your goals. ‘Follow us!’ ‘Please retweet!’ ‘Visit our website!’ Be clear on what you want in your content.
• Create content which isn’t being promoted, but which supports it. Running a promoted tweet? Create other tweets around the same time for people to find on your account which relate to it. It’s hard to get everything across in one tweet, supporting content for those who are unsure of what they want to do will help.
• Work on getting people sharing your tweets before the campaign even starts so that your content looks more popular. Everything is better on Twitter when you look popular to someone who finds you for the first time!

Every extra push will help you reach viral numbers on Twitter as you spend money on your Ad Campaign. It won’t happen by accident, you have to put in the effort.

General tips to get more shares

No matter what campaign you’re running, the content you share will be important. People want to follow accounts with great content, they want to retweet great content, and they want to participate in trends with great content.

On Twitter, this comes down to sharing videos, GIFs, and images, as well as the other basics of learning how to tweet. This visual content always performs better. There’s also all of the information that you can manage to squeeze into an image that won’t fit into those 140 characters. Here’s a perfect example:

The text gives you the links you need, the video shows you how to get what you want. Two ways to share information, and lots of retweets to go with it!

The other way to get more shares during your Twitter Ad Campaign is to give people incentives for sharing or participating. Running a sale or promotion is an easy one, but how about running a sale which requires you to @mention one of your friends? Now you’re using Twitter to its fullest!

Combining this tactic with your Ad Campaign can yield phenomenal results.

A/B test it all day long, and analyse your results when it’s done

No one ever said you had to do one Twitter Ad Campaign and stick with it. You can try different Ad Campaigns for reaching the same goal. You can switch the images for GIFs, or the GIFs for videos. You can vary the calls to action, or the supporting wording. Add hashtags, take away hashtags. You can do A/B/C/D testing if you can track it correctly with all of the variables in play on Twitter.

Why is this important? You always want to find out more about your audience. Big data is a big deal, and each piece of data you gather here will go towards helping you plan future campaigns. Analyzing your data, gathered through your Twitter Analytics and your own click-tracking via URL shorteners, should be a constant task. It’s made all the more important to do this while you’re spending money!