3 Things You Should Know Before You Advertise On Twitter

May 10, 2013

strategy digital

There are three basic concepts you need to learn when start to advertise on twitter. Twitter advertising is quite simple to setup with their basic dashboard - much easier than Google Adwords. Once you know about Twitter ad formats, targeting, and pricing you are ready to get started.

Twitter Ad Formats

There are two ad formats for using the self-service Twitter Advertising platform.

Promoted Accounts

Promoted Accounts - Advertise On Twitter

When advertising on Twitter, one of the ad formats is promoted accounts. Using this type of ad format puts your account in front of people like the followers you already have. The goal of this format is to build your audience and gain new, targeted followers to your account. And you only pay when someone follows your account. As you will see below, you can also use specific targeting to reach potential followers you want - by interest and gender. Your ads will show up across all of Twitter's platforms and you can track everything.

Promoted Tweets Promoted tweets are simple - they are just tweets in your account that you promote to users that may not be following you. This allows you to get your most important tweets in front of users. If you run an e-commerce operation, these tweets could include tweets to your products, photos of your product on Instagram, coupon offers, and more. If you are in content then this may be tweets with links to your best articles. In the self service Twitter dashboard there is a slick way to select the tweets you wish to promote. Here is an example of a recent promoted tweets campaign I ran for the Jambox Case. Promoted Tweets - Advertise On Twitter  

Targeting Twitter Ads

Targeting ads is important as it allows you to reach specific types of users with your ads. There are five primary ways to target ads to users on Twitter - geography, gender, interests, device, and keywords. These are all pretty self explanatory. For instance if you are a restaurant you would likely target by geography to attract users local to you. If you sell women's clothes you'd likely only target by gender. If you sell something like the Jambox case you'd likely target users by interests like cycling. If you sell an iPhone app, you can target users using the Twitter app on their iPhone. And the last option is keyword targeting - which is a relatively new development to advertise on Twitter. I'm personally most excited about this new targeting option as it allows you to target users that have used a specific keyword in one of their tweets. Lets say you are selling the best steak seasoning. Using keyword targeting you can get your promoted account or promoted tweet in front of anyone that tweets "grilling" or "steak" in a tweet. This is very powerful to attract interest from users that may be tweeting about keywords related to your product.

Twitter Ad Pricing

Twitter advertising pricing is interesting - it's based on Pay Per Engagement. Twitter explains it great...

"You’ll only be charged when people follow your Promoted Account or retweet, reply, favorite or click on your Promoted Tweets. You’ll never be charged for your organic activity on Twitter. There’s no monthly fee and you set your maximum daily budget."

This is pretty straight simple, eh? You only get charged for engagement. If your promoted account never gets followed - you never pay. If no one interacts with your promoted tweet - you don't pay. You can specify a maximum bid per engagement and a daily budget. Twitter will never go over either of those allowing you to manage your ad spend wisely.


Active Projects

Here are some of the projects I am currently working on. Some are side projects, some are client projects, and some are just for fun. I like to build things and I like to share what I learn along the way. If you have any questions about any of these projects, feel free to reach out.

📦 Flow Export

Export Salesforce Flow to Miro to collaborate with your team. Read more about the launch of Flow Export on the Salesforce AppExchange.

🤖 Make Storytime

Personalized children's stories generated by AI. This is an app I am building with my kids.

📠 Fax Online

Yea, I know. But there is a long tail for everything and believe it or not there was an underserved market for people that need to send a fax online. Some people (like me!) just need to send a one time fax.

Read more about this micro Saas project in a blog post about building an online fax service.

📱 Cloud Number

Cloud Number is a virtual phone app that helps you protect your privacy online. Use it to receive SMS online and keep your phone number private. It's also a great service for a freelancer or entrepreneur that wants to have a separate phone for their business for SMS and voicemail.

🥑 Free URL Indexer

Free URL Indexer is a free tool to help you index your backlinks and get them into Google faster. It's a simple tool that I built to help me with my own SEO efforts and I decided to share it with the world. It's a free tool and I don't even ask for your email address. Just paste in your URL and click the button.

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