Originally designed as a social media application for connecting with others, expressing opinions, and having discussions, Twitter has evolved into a platform where individuals acquire current news, post humor, share memes, and post impulsive statements.
Although there have been some changes at the platform in recent years, it remains one of the leading social networks worldwide. Consequently, a section of your audience is probably active on the platform.
Twitter Ads
Paid Tweets, known as Twitter Ads, comprise of text and multimedia content displayed on the Twitter platform in the form of Promoted Ads, Follower Ads, and Trend Takeover via desktop or mobile application. Despite being labeled as “promoted,” these Tweets can generally be interacted with, just like an organic Tweet, such as retweeting, liking, or replying.
Social media marketing ads are still most effective on Twitter, making it one of the leading platforms.
By exclusively relying on Facebook and Instagram Ads, you may believe that you have a full-fledged paid social strategy, however, not considering Twitter Ads could mean overlooking potential opportunities.
Certainly, Twitter is witnessing an increase in the number of users, particularly among younger demographics. If you’re already implementing a Twitter Ads campaign or if you simply desire to learn more about it, let’s explore the essential information you need to excel on Twitter by 2023.
Types of Twitter Ads
Promoted Ads
Various ad formats are available on Twitter, with the promotions displaying within a user’s timeline in the same manner as regular tweets, apart from the “promoted” label found at the bottom.
- Text: Plain text Tweet
- Single image: An image and a block of text
- Video ads: A video and a block of text
- Carousel ads: A combination of two-to-six images or videos in a single ad
- Moment: A combination of Tweets with a title, description, and cover photo
Paying attention to the specifications of each format is crucial to ensure that your advertisements are of high quality. For instance, though you can incorporate approximately 100 Tweets into a Moment (a collection of curated stories from Twitter), the platform suggests using less than 10.
Follower Ads
Your Twitter account is showcased through various spots on the platform such as the timeline, search outcomes, and the “Who to follow” segment. This promotion assists in attracting followers who may be interested in your content and helps to broaden your fan base.
Twitter Amplify
With this choice, your advertisements can be matched with premium video content that has been verified by publishers. In March of 2021, several new Amplify options became available to advertisers.
- Curated categories: You can display paid ads with the video content from 15+ preset groups of publishers. These categories and publishers may change over time.
- New design: Amplify ads have a specific look with a brand name and logo in the upper-left corner of the ad. You can also choose a call to action (CTA) out of several presets to appear next to the brand name.
- More information: When creating Amplify ads, you can browse the list of publishers in the category to make better advertising choices.
Utilizing the Amplify Sponsorships program is an option for partnering with one publisher throughout your advertising campaign. However, self-serve advertisers are not currently offered this choice according to Twitter.
Twitter Takeover
With this sophisticated method of Twitter advertising, you can craft a captivating encounter for the audience. The alternatives available for this type of advertisement are:
- Timeline takeover: Your ad is the first ad a user sees when they open Twitter.
- Trend takeover: This puts your ads near whatever topics are currently trending under the Explore tab and on top of the Trends list for 24 hours.
Twitter Ads can have a vastly different cost depending on factors such as the industry, audience, format, and objectives. Typically, standard promoted ads are the cheapest option. Conversely, more intricate alternatives like Takeover often provide better results.
Twitter Ads tips for 2023
1. Set a goal
To carry out an effective Twitter ad campaign, it’s crucial to establish a goal. Defining your desired outcome will aid in optimizing the campaign’s organization. At the outset of the campaign, it’s essential to choose an objective, which represents your ultimate aim.
When using Twitter, you have the ability to select from a range of objectives. These objectives include:
- Raise awareness: You can promote your tweets to raise awareness of your business or build brand recognition and maximize your reach to interested leads.
- Build engagement: This goal focuses on promoting your tweets to get more people to retweet, like, and reply to them.
- Gain followers: If you set this goal, you use ads to promote your account and get leads to follow your Twitter page.
- Website clicks: You can direct people to your website by using Twitter ads so that you can gain more clicks and website traffic to your site.
- App installs: If you want to promote your app, you can use Twitter to get people to download your app.
It is necessary to allocate sufficient time in identifying the objective of your campaign. The objective will facilitate the organization of your campaign and selection of appropriate advertising techniques for your target audience. After establishing the objective, you can commence the development of your campaign.
2. Target a specific audience
Knowing your target audience is crucial when using Twitter ads. It is essential to identify those individuals or groups that are most likely to follow your page or purchase your products. You should consider who would be the most interested in your business.
Creating more effective advertising campaigns requires you to shape them according to your target audience, as they will influence the type of ads you run. The establishment of your target market is thus crucial.
Consider the demographic that is most inclined to purchase your products. Do they consist of men or women? Which age group shows interest in your services or products? Developing a profile of the individuals who exhibit the greatest interest in your products will enhance your advertising efforts and resonate with a larger audience.
Utilizing targeting features can assist in directing your marketing towards individuals who are most likely to be interested in your products. After establishing a primary target market, you can employ targeting features to connect with individuals who match your audience description. These features enable your business to reach potential customers by leveraging their preferred influencers and commonly used keywords.
3. Convey a sense of urgency
To ensure the success of your Twitter advertisement, it is paramount to motivate your audience to respond to your ad. A sense of urgency in your ad compels your audience to take swift action.
By selecting particular phrases like “limited time only” or “deal ends on (date),” the language used in your ad can help generate a sense of urgency among viewers. This communicates to potential customers that there is a time constraint regarding the availability of your offer, prompting them to act swiftly in order to reap the benefits.
Generating a sense of urgency can increase the likelihood of leads responding to your ads, as they will be more motivated to act on them due to the limited availability. Implementing this strategy can result in an improvement in the outcomes of your Twitter advertisements.
4. Create engaging ads
To ensure the effectiveness of your Twitter ads, it is essential to create ads that are captivating to your audience and encourage them to engage with it. One effective strategy is to ask a question that is relevant to your ad. Starting your question with phrases such as “Are you worn out of…”, “In search of something…”, or “Do you require…” can be very effective.
By asking questions that require a yes or no answer, you prompt your audience to express an interest in your ad and potentially interact with it. This technique can significantly enhance the level of engagement with your ads.
5. Be mindful of hashtags
Using hashtags can be a valuable tool in enhancing your presence on social media platforms. They can effectively increase interaction and engagement with your target audience. However, it is important to exercise caution when incorporating hashtags into your Twitter advertisements.
While hashtags can enhance engagement, they have the potential to divert your audience from your ad. Your audience might click on the hashtag rather than your ad, which could be distracting and prevent them from clicking on your ad.
Using hashtags is not completely prohibited. In fact, if you want to increase your Twitter followers or promote your brand, hashtags can be a useful tool to interact with them. By clicking on the hashtag in your advertisement, people can discover more information about how this hashtag is relevant to your enterprise.
To prioritize conversions, it may be beneficial to avoid using hashtags, as this can help your audience concentrate on the advertisement and take steps to convert.
6. Explore Trend Takeover and Trend Takeover+
The Promoted Trend Spotlight feature was introduced by Twitter at the beginning of 2020 and has now been renamed Trend Takeover. The updated version includes an option called Takeover+, which integrates “immersive video creative.”
With this capability, you can position your advertisement right at the apex of the “Explore” section (limited to the initial two times an individual visits daily), greatly enhancing its prominence. This feature accommodates both still text and six-second animated GIFs and videos.
It should be emphasized that Trend Takeover is a high-quality positioning option available on this platform. Insights were shared by HawkSEM’s Paid Social Media Managers, Nicole Goodnough and Ellie Hayes.
Being included in the promoted trends list has the potential to significantly increase traffic and raise awareness. The Trend Takeover function provides an even more attention-grabbing experience, offering further possibilities for generating conversions and leaving a lasting impression.
Given that Trend Takeover and Trend Takeover+ have exclusive placement for 24 hours, and the cost for a promoted trend stands at $200k/day, it’s not a viable option for most brands. Nonetheless, during significant national or global events such as the World Cup or Super Bowl, prominent brands have the potential to attract massive traffic to their site or app using the premium 24-hour placement.
7. Take advantage of accelerated delivery
If you use default settings for your Twitter Ads campaign, the platform will allocate your spending evenly throughout the day. This means that if your daily budget is $100, it will be spread out fairly evenly over 24 hours, at around $4 per hour.
You can disable the default delivery option in order to hasten your campaign and attain quicker outcomes. Upon doing so, Twitter will promptly provide impressions and stimulate interactions until the daily budget has been exhausted.
8. Rethink your Twitter cards
During the time when Tweets were restricted to 140 characters and businesses were in dire need of additional advertising opportunities, Twitter cards were introduced. As tweets featuring images tend to generate more leads, these cards remain popular.
Twitter automatically retrieves the prominent image from the page you’ve linked to and incorporates it into your visual Tweet, known as your Twitter card, when you share a link. If there isn’t an available image, the Twitter card may appear empty.
If you are looking to enhance your card’s impact, Twitter provides an in-feed promoted tweet featuring it as an illustration.
- Use summary cards with larger images to take advantage of higher-quality pictures (Twitter supports 560×750 pixels).
- Leverage twitter:site and twitter:creator to pack two user names in one card for a more efficient promotional effort.
- Use up all 250 characters to give value to the card. (The Title tag is a separate piece of text, so don’t double up on verbiage.)
9. Experiment with videos
The popularity of video content is growing on Twitter and other platforms. To make your advertisements more attractive and benefit from this medium, establish a campaign focused on “video views”. By doing so, you can showcase your video within the feed and enhance your interaction with the audience.
The instructions for setting up campaigns aimed at generating views for videos on Twitter are as follows:
- Maximum video size: 1GB (ideally under 30MB)
- Tweet copy: 280 characters (each link costs you 23 characters, so when you include one link, you’ll have 257 characters left)
- Video length: The maximum is 2 minutes and 20 seconds, but the sweet spot seems to be around 15 seconds. If the video length is under 60 seconds, the video will loop.
- CC: Closed captions or text overlays are mandatory.
It is possible to generate a pre-roll views crusade where your video advertisement gets showcased at the start of a user-requested video. Twitter partners with over 200 content providers to locate a suitable match for you, and your advertisement will screen before your partner’s content.
10. Test your ads
Ensuring the effectiveness of your advertisements is crucial when launching a campaign. Investing time, money, and effort in ads that do not yield results is undesirable. Testing your ads is critical in developing an effectual campaign for your company.
By performing A/B testing, you can examine two distinct advertisements and evaluate the reaction of your target market. This will provide you with an understanding of the ads that are more successful for your target audience. Although you might assume that your advertisement is effective, it is possible that an alternative advertisement may produce superior outcomes.
Ensuring that you test your ads allows for the production of the optimal Twitter ad for your campaign.
