Social media advertising is a great way to get traffic to a site that hasn’t yet established its authority. With a good Twitter ads strategy you can see an increase in the number of visitors right away. Twitter is one of the most popular social media networks, next to Facebook and Instagram so it should be an important part of your social media marketing.
Social Media Experts we’ve seen countless articles about Facebook advertising but not that many about Twitter ads. That’s why we decided to work with Minuca Elena and ask her to reach out to 41 social media influencers and ask them the following question:
What is your best Twitter ads strategy that you use to get more targeted traffic to your site?
We received some great tips and advice that we are happy to share with you.
Rebekah Radice
Twitter’s Website Generation Cards are an excellent way to reach new customers, direct them to a specific page, and optimize for conversions. But don’t let the options of where to direct traffic stop you from moving forward.
Pick an offer from top performing content, create a landing page with a tool like LeadPages, Clickfunnels, or Optimize Press, add your opt in, and start building a list.
Anyone of those tools can tie into your email marketing software of choice to add each lead to a specific email workflow.
Mike Allton – The Social Media Hat
I’ve run many Twitter ad campaigns over the years. I’ve tested different kinds of ads, different formats and media, and certainly a variety of different targeting techniques.
Now, certain kinds of ads and goals are going to suit different audiences better than others. But the most effective targeting I’ve ever found is to target followers of specific Twitter users who talk about the topic my tweet is about.
Whenever I’ve tried to use Twitter’s topical targeting (Interests), they’ve been expensive and wildly ineffective. I’ll share a recent example.
In October I published an article which was an in-depth review of Agorapulse, the social media management tool. As part of the promotion for that article, I ran a Twitter Ad campaign that promoted the first and most important tweet announcing the new review.
For $20, that tweet earned 923 clicks at a rate of $0.02 per click and was seen by over 46,000 people. My targeting was gender, location and language neutral, focusing entirely on a dozen or so specific Twitter accounts that are followed by people interested in using and learning about social media and related tools.
Clearly, that’s a technique that I can test over and over and leverage into highly effective lead campaigns. I advise you to do the same!
Sam Hurley — OPTIM-EYEZ
Here is a simple yet powerful two-step approach to achieve targeted traffic via Twitter Ads. To deploy it, you will need to have previously installed the Twitter website tag to collect user data!
#1) Post an insightful, long-form piece of content on your blog that is directed towards your ideal customer’s awareness phase.
BONUS: Litter this piece with powerful lead magnets such as attractive content upgrades. This makes the most of any traffic acquired.
Next, tweet out this piece organically. Once you spark some engagement on this organic tweet by simply reaching out to people — promote it (with spend) to gain even more.
The organic engagement will serve as social proof and aid interaction on your now-promoted tweet, decreasing costs by engaging more of those who view it.
#2) Now set up a Twitter remarketing campaign for the same tweet.
You should already have a decent amount of social proof on the tweet after the above tactics, so now it’s time to leverage it…
This is where you really want to be gaining qualified traffic, not just engagement on the tweet itself.
You can target your tweet’s exposure to users who have/haven’t visited particular pages of your blog and/or other bonus material via previous pieces by using ‘Tailored Audiences’ — these people are already much warmer than those not at all familiar with your brand and content, so your cost-per-click (CPC) should also be less.
Dennis Yu – BlitzMetrics
My favorite Twitter ads strategy is to promote whatever tweet in the last year that had the most engagement, manually bidding 5 cent per interaction. I don’t use automatic bidding, since then my cost per engagement will be 20 times higher.
The system will give you a warning that your bid is too low and that you won’t get much traffic, but you can ignore that every time.
Ideally, the tweet I’m promoting has an image in it and tags someone I want to get notifications from retweets. Then that person or organization will see that I’m actively promoting them, but probably not realize it’s coming from ads.
I like to spend $1 per day on these promoted tweets in their own campaigns, so I can monitor performance. And then I can have several dozen of these going at once, just like we do as part of the “dollar a day” strategy on Facebook.
Lilach Bullock
A good Twitter ad needs 3 elements:
– An eye-catching visual
– Compelling copy
– In-depth ad targeting
Your ads’ copy needs to be short and to the point: include a question or two and always add a clear, compelling call to action.
As for targeting your ad, make use of all Twitter ads features: add specific leads/followers that you want to reach, target your email list, and target at least 50 keywords and interests.
But most importantly, test your ads: that is the best way to optimize and get the best possible results. Experiment with different calls to action, different visuals, and even different targeting — but make sure it’s only one change at a time so that you can figure out what affects your bottom line.
Courtney Silverstein – Mizuho Americas
Twitter is a great platform for driving traffic to owned properties, such as a corporate website or blog. With 330 million monthly active users, Twitter has a broad and diverse user base, so finding the audience that’s relevant to your brand on the platform can be tricky.
That’s where Twitter ads can help. Twitter ads allows marketers to find and reach audiences across the social network with promoted tweets.
There are a variety of strategies marketers can employ in order to reach their target audience using Twitter ads. If the campaign objective is to drive targeted traffic to a website, it’s important to first develop the right type of creative. Within Twitter ads, marketers can create “Cards.”
What’s great about Twitter Cards is that they make your entire tweet creative act as a clickable link.
For example, if you post a tweet with an image and a viewer clicks the image, Twitter will only expand the image; however, if you create a Card with that image, the entire image acts as a URL, so when your target audience clicks on it, they are immediately directed to the website where that image is driving.
Cards can also be developed with video, which is a very effective format for grabbing attention and driving action.
Once you’ve developed your Cards, you’re then going to hone in on the audience that’s most relevant to your brand. Twitter offers a variety of targeting strategies, which can be employed depending on your objective.
One of the most effective ways to reach a targeted audience is by utilizing Twitter’s Tailored Audiences. Twitter allows you to upload a file that contains data, such as email addresses, phone numbers, Twitter usernames, and more.
Once the file is uploaded, your records are matched with people who are active on Twitter, so that you can target them in your campaigns. Marketers can utilize this kind of data to reach customers that they know are relevant to their brand.
For marketers that don’t have this type of data, Twitter offers other targeting strategies that can be effective in reaching a relevant audience. For example, marketers can target based on specific Behaviors (i.e. gift buyers — households likely to buy gifts), upcoming Events (i.e., Milan Fashion Week) or Interests (i.e., Movies and television — Comedy).
Twitter also allows you to find audiences based on specific Keywords they’ve used in their tweets. This will help you find people who have expressed an interest in topics relevant to your brand. As long as you know your target audience, Twitter ads have a variety of targeting capabilities to drive the right people to your website.
Warren Whitlock
Anyone can target an audience and show ads for traffic. With the built-in split-testing, you can use trial and error to find the market and interests that work.
To streamline this to happen faster, we start with the code on sites. On most sites, the majority of visitors leave without taking any action… if you have the pixel installed, you’ll have a highly targeted audience to engage with through targeted ads aimed at content.
Optimization of ads and site conversions along with content-rich posts amplified with ads can improve results exponentially.
Lukasz Zelezny
I think optimization is key here. You need to think about who your customers are and how you can create ads that will interest them and encourage them to perform your call to action.
For example, when creating a twitter card ad, you need to succinctly show the viewers of the ad what your business is all about. Don’t just expect them to know who you are. Add a sentence of text that explains the business, or what you want the viewer to do, and make sure the photo is clear. You want viewers to see who you are at a glance as this is the only way they’ll be encouraged to click on your link.
If you’ve tried doing this and you still aren’t getting the traffic you had hoped, you might want to try asking a question in your ad. When you ask a question, you are creating a conversation with the reader, and this can encourage them to click through to your website. In fact, according to Twitter, ads that contain questions elicit 25% more clicks than those that don’t.
Finally, I think it’s vital that you continue to change your ad to see what works and what doesn’t. Try different images, headlines, and copy and see which versions of your ad lead to the most targeted traffic. You really can’t just create one ad and sit back and do nothing.
Ron Sela
With 330 million monthly active users, using Twitter ads to drive traffic to your website can help you take your social media marketing strategy to the next level. But not all Twitter ad strategies will help you get the results that you want.
To help you maximize your use of Twitter ads, here are the three effective strategies to send traffic to your site. Best of all, these procedures are easy to employ, and you can completely set up your Twitter ad campaign in an hour or less.
Take advantage of trending events: This strategy makes use of real-time trends to put your promoted tweets in front of users engaged with a real-time event on Twitter. This creates a sense of urgency in response to your promoted tweet that compels users to click through thanks to the high interest in that event. These events can be anything from tv shows to elections to sporting events. The trick is making your content relevant and then taking advantage of that timing.
Target specific hashtags: By taking advantage of powerful social media tools like MyTweetAlerts.com audience list generator, you can compile a Twitter list based upon users who are tweeting and engaging with a specific hashtag. This file then becomes your target audience for your promoted tweets.
Target followers of your competition: This is the single most effective way to get your promoted tweets in front of people who are already interested in what your brand has to offer. By using tools such as Twitonomy you can quickly cultivate a list of users who follow and engage with your competition as well as the leading influencers in your industry. That list is then funneled into the audience manager section when setting up your ad. This lets you get your products and services noticed by people who are probably interested in what you have to offer.
Ramsay – Blog Tyrant
We’ve been running some successful Twitter Ads for a while now, and one of the most important factors to consider is the audience that will be not just viewing your ads, but also replying to them.
For example, if you have an advert that generates a lot of negative replies due to poor targeting, those replies will be present for everyone to see. It’s better to individually select similar accounts during your campaign setup to target so as to ensure your ad is only shown to people who are receptive to the information.
As your ads build momentum and gather retweets, it’s important that they don’t also get a lot of negative attention.
Mike Kawula
Twitter’s ad platform isn’t the easiest to learn for newbies and even for those experienced.
There’s little content available on best practices and thus you traditionally won’t hear of many solopreneurs using the platform.
A non-crowded space like this can spell opportunity for the smart marketer. There are 2 particular features I like to use with Twitter ads (one is brand new).
The first is targeting followers of accounts I know have a similar audience that will resonate also with my content. This is a great feature compared to Facebook’s Ad platform, because you can target even very small accounts, which isn’t possible much of the time with Facebook. Doing this can drive very low CPC’s (cost per click).
For example, we know that Podcasters utilize our service and did a post on our site with rock star podcaster John Lee Dumas. We in-turn ran an ad of that post with an image of John on Twitter, which resulted in tons of shares by running the ad specifically to John’s Twitter followers.
The second strategy I’ve currently started using is Twitter Promote Mode, Twitter’s newest Beta program.
For $99 a month Twitter will promote your Tweets for you and get you in front of the audiences you choose.
I’ve recently launched a new company called Dinner Table MBA and we’re looking to drive signups for our new free digital magazine, focused on helping bring conversations back to the dinner table for families.
This is relatively new, but thus far the impressions and clicks have been impressive and for just $99 a month, it’s well worth it.
Zac Johnson – Blogging
Personally, out of all of the social platforms, I tend to use Twitter the most (from an engagement and posting preference).
When it comes to Twitter ads, it’s all about using the right headlines, wording and images. Since billions of tweets are actively getting sent out all the time, most of them won’t be seen. This means you need to post often, and with attention seeking headlines and images.
Twitter ads are also great for remarketing. If someone is already on your mailing list or visiting your website, it’s a great idea to start showing them ads through Twitter as well.
Sean Si – SEO Hacker
Well, the world of Twitter is not rocket science — it doesn’t take much to understand the current happenings on Twitter. So, with the use of Twitter ads, a person, influencer, brand, or company can definitely reach a wider scope of an audience without having to break their backs in putting out numerous tweets every day in hopes of using quantity over quality to gain more followers, retweets, and increased reach.
I believe that the best Twitter ads strategy starts with thoroughly understanding your goals. You can’t just approach your Twitter ads haphazardly while thinking that once it’s up, you’ll be reaching your goal. Start by asking yourself this simple question: “Why am I doing an ad?”, and from there, you can safely determine your target audience, the appropriate ad type, your tweet’s content, and the metrics you’ll be using to measure the ad’s success.
It is also imperative for people that use ads is that there are different types of ads for different goals. Some commonplace Twitter advertisements would be:
- Promoted Tweets: This is useful for improving the reach of your top performing tweets.
- Promoted Accounts: Useful for increasing the number of followers your Twitter account has.
- Lead Generating Cards: Useful for increasing the number of your email subscribers.
- Website Cards: Useful for generating traffic to your website.
- Application Cards: Useful for increasing the number of downloads of your offered applications — if there are any.
When a person has grasped the usefulness of the different types of ads, you’re all set to use your Twitter ads to get more traffic to your site, provided it all goes well.
Megan Harris – SYZYGY
Twitter’s ad platform offers targeting criteria options beyond the usual location, device and basic socio-demographic factors to make sure you are engaging with the right audience. For example, you can choose Follower Targeting, which puts your message in front of the people who follow Twitter accounts that you deem relevant to your brand, such as influencers, competitors and lookalike audiences — people similar to your current audiences.
Twitter ads are an easy way to reach your warm prospects in a new channel — just upload your prospect lists and those of them who are on Twitter will be served your Twitter ad. This capability is like Google’s Customer Match and Facebook’s Custom Audience.
We have found Twitter ads effective in a number of situations, including app download and adoption. Our experience shows that Twitter ads are best used as part of a wider mix of tactics and channels as these campaigns can quickly saturate their audience.
So, it’s important to run A/B/C tests and experiment with the numerous ways the audience can be spliced. You’ll extend the effective life of the campaign and may also find some unexpected bright spots in audience adoption.
David Krauter — Websites That Sell
GET CLEAR ON YOUR OBJECTIVE! This is more important than ever before, especially with online advertising. People aren’t going to Twitter to get sold… they are on twitter to engage. So before you start writing and designing ads, get clear on the objective of your campaign. Is the objective to increase followers, drive traffic, generate leads or build your brand?
Twitter has different ad formats, that allow you to achieve the above objectives — it’s important you choose the right ad format to achieve the goal of your campaign.
Here are a few different ad formats that help achieve the discussed objectives:
Promoted Tweets: these are perfect for getting your brand, message, and tweets in front of new prospects — extending your brand reach to a wider target market. Best thing — you can use tweets that have already proven to do well with your current following.
Promoted Accounts: this strategy will help you increase followers. With this strategy, your account will appear in the “who to follow” section on users twitter home pages.
Website Cards: This strategy is all about driving traffic. You can catch attention with a headline, include a catchy photo and call to action on these cards.
Lean-Gen Cards: You can get people subscribing to your mailing list directly from Twitter. This is a perfect lead generation strategy to build email subscribers and push twitter traffic through a sales funnel.
Tim Bourquin – After Offers
Facebook ads are extremely popular because of the demographic targeting and self-serve advertising platform they have to offer.
Twitter also has a lot of potential as well, it just seems more complicated and ‘boring’ to set up and measure results. With this in mind, it’s important to use your existing customer data to target the best audiences on Twitter.
Since we are in the business of email and lead generation, we can target an exact audience that we know are already interested in something, then show ONLY that audience ads on Twitter.
Not only does this prove to be a much more effective way to advertise online, it also makes it easier to create profitable ad campaigns and not have to worry about going through a large budget quickly.
Christi Tasker – PuTTinOuT
When establishing a Twitter advertising campaign for our clients we focus on a small targeted audience based on hashtags or location; this works especially well when we provide services for location-based services.
For hotels, we target tweets that were posted in other travel destinations and for restaurants, we target users within a specific proximity when bookings are needed to fill seats.
For visitors bureaus, we target people outside the area whose friends or followers are tweeting about specifically related subjects.
Yan Gilbert
To receive a higher engagement on promoted tweets, whether it’s more retweets or visits to your site, you need two things. First, you need to target the right audience. Second, you need to promote to them at the right time.
One way to find the right target audience is to promote to the followers of large accounts which have similar interests to what is being promoting. For example, if you are promoting a new dog toy you just created, you could choose to promote to the followers of large pet store chains.
If you have something that might be of interest to sport fans, then promote your tweet to the followers of sport teams. Sometimes finding the right twitter accounts is not so easy, but if you think about your audience enough you will find some large Twitter accounts that have followers which are the exact target market you are looking for.
Getting your tweet across to them at the right time is the next step. First, you need to find out when your target is most active on Twitter. Sometimes it will be obvious depending on your niche, but if it is not then you will need to figure this out. There are various online tools to help you ‘find the best time to tweet’.
However, instead of promoting tweets right in the middle if the busiest times, try promoting your tweet at the tail end, when things start to slow down. You will have a better chance of your message being seen because people tend to ignore promoted tweets when there are too many incoming tweets, so tweeting when it’s a little less busy gets your message more time to be engaged with.
Karl Kangur — MRR Media
Twitter’s “Website Cards” ads are the way to go for driving targeted web traffic, but as with any pay-per-click campaign, it’s not worth doing unless you do it right.
Step one is always to make a specific landing page for each ad — don’t make the all-too-common mistake of throwing traffic at your homepage, unless it’s a squeeze page for your only product.
Next, do some keyword and audience research. I recommend SpyFu as a good place to start — run your site through it and combine with data from your analytics to determine who is most likely to click your ad, and what they want to hear.
Take notes from existing ads and then make a beautiful image and provocative copy for yours (click here and check “Image Website card” for guidelines). Aim for short and impactful copy, include quotes, statistics, or questions, and don’t sell here (that’s the landing page’s job) — just engage. Don’t include any links or hashtags in the copy, drive all attention to your landing page. Include UTM codes in the URL and make sure the utm_campaign parameter is unique for each ad.
You can target by demographics, keywords, interests or behaviors, existing followers, and even convert your CRM email lists for retargeting. Start narrow and expand as you test your ads and landing pages. Finally, make a complementary tweet (you can include hashtags now since you won’t be paying if someone clicks them) and pin it to your Twitter page. Happy fishing!
Apolline Adiju
I’ a Digital Marketing Consultant and I use Twitter Ads especially to drive traffic to a cold audience.
Why so?
Because most people consume content on this platform as compared to other platforms like Facebook where most use it to socialize with family and friends.
My best strategy to drive targeted traffic to a website for my clients is selecting the Website Clicks or Conversion option and use a Twitter Card option. This makes it easy for my targeted audience to click through easily to the designated website, landing page or sales page.
The trick here is using tweets with “catchy” images because they tend to bring in a lot of engagement and traffic back to my client’s sites.
Since videos are becoming popular, I drive traffic to videos using the Video Views option which I later use to retarget for a warm or hot offer.
Note! The key is researching your marketing, knowing what they want and targeting the right people with the right offers.
Caitlin Thayer – Matter Communications
Twitter ads should be used to supplement the 5–10+ tweets you’re already making on a daily basis.
Tweeting consistently is the best way to bring more traffic to your website, and promoting some of those tweets to a specific audience will help you get new followers and click throughs. You can target your promoted tweets to a particular geographic location or demographic.
Also take a look at promoting tweets to people who follow users who are similar to you — those are people who are most likely already interested in you but just haven’t found you yet!
Doyle Buehler – The Digital Delusion
One of the best strategies that I have found is that you must have a robust digital ecosystem in place before running any ads. Think of all of the things that they will bounce around with you online — social, web, content, etc.
Ensure that you have it all together so that you continue to expand the time that your audience comes in contact with you. Most people won’t buy on the first click of an ad, so you need to ensure that you have enough assets for them to enjoy or understand, before they are even ready to make a purchase with you.
Finally, keep in mind that in any campaign you must have a clear “goal” and action that you want them to take, and then help them along that journey — an ad shouldn’t be looked at as a single transaction, but rather one of many entry points into your complete digital ecosystem.
Srish Agrawal – Logo Design Team
If you want to find better success with Twitter and their advertising platform, be sure to put in the time to understand the different types of campaigns they offer.
For example, of you just want more exposure and branding, “tweet engagements” is the way to go. If you are already finding success with YouTube or Facebook advertising, be sure to give Twitter “video views” a go. Options are also there for clicks, app installs, increasing followers and much more.
No matter which method you choose, just make sure you are tracking the ROI individually for each campaign.
Jonathan Gardner – Share IQ
Twitter ad strategy (for a newly launched B2B company)
- We are focused on awareness (engagement with Twitter content ON the platform) and engagement with the content that drives traffic to our site
- We target based on interests: Geography, our industry, handles of relevant companies in the marketing technology industry, handles of influential industry people, handles of journalists and relevant publications.
- Our content aimed at site visits takes keyword/trending themes that are topical and relevant to our industry (marketing software to help brands optimize their social media content), topical to relevant seasonality and events (e.g. Cyber Monday), and the thought-leadership positions and how-to insights we are owning (e.g. “how to get more value from your earned media content.”
- We do a mix of paid and organic Twitter posting, with videos aimed at engagement with the content on Twitter and links to news coverage, reports and blog posts to our site.
- We run always-on campaigns and others aimed at Black Friday/Cyber Monday interests or to promote a specific report or piece of content.
- We have been trending consistently with more than 3,000 website conversions and nearly 700,000 impressions from our Twitter campaign (website traffic focused); and nearly 100,000 video views monthly from our video engagement campaign.
Alex Andrade-Walz – Spatially
Twitter’s power comes in its ability to contextually target your message. While other advertising platforms focus more on who you target, Twitter focuses on where you target — giving marketers the ability to plug their ads into an organic conversation by targeting the hashtags and phrases their customers are talking about.
For event marketers, this could mean targeting official event hashtags (e.g.: #Dreamforce17, #MozCon) to get in front of thousands of people going to or talking about an event in your industry. For software companies, this could mean targeting keywords related to the problem your solution solves (e.g.: customer onboarding, multivariate testing).
In both of these use cases, tapping into an ongoing conversation will ensure that your ad is reaching the right audience in a contextually relevant manner.
Anna Segova – Alterno Marketing
Create a lead add without the Twitter lead generation cart. Try to use just a photo or a link instead. This way it feels less like an ad, so the user will be less prone to skip past it. Twitter’s lead generation carts are feature-reach but they still look like ads.
Another tip is to always split test a few ads. Whether you have a few different ads or testing out different calls-to-action, it is always worthwhile to test which one performs well. For my clients at Alterno Marketing, I also often utilize existing posts that have performed well in the past. This way, you can make sure that your ads are driving the most traffic to your site.
David Attard – CollectiveRay
The trick with ads on social networks is to make your ad look less like an ad than it really it is.
You need to make your ad look like a post which is particularly engaging. Never mind the content, it’s a given that you need an ad that is targeted and engaging. But even more important is social proof — i.e. making sure that before you start advertising, your post already looks like it’s got plenty of engagement.
For example, if you plan to promote a Tweet, first make sure that the post has plenty of engagement, likes and retweets. To do this, you could send a link to the tweet to your mailing list, a Facebook group, or your most engaged fans with an incentive or call to retweet.
Once it’s picked up good engagement metrics, then promote it. This will ensure that anybody who sees the ad, can also see that this seems to be a very engaging post. This will pique their interest and they’re more likely to engage with your post and lower your total cost of advertising.
Edward Sturm
We often use promoted tweets to boost and test very targeted top-of-funnel long form SEO posts. These are posts which we believe will be shared among their verticals because the utility factor is so high.
In this way, we’re using Promoted Tweets to kickstart the SEO process. Once the post begins seeing shares, we no longer have to boost it with Promoted Tweets- traction happens organically at this point.
We also use Promoted Tweets to A/B test these long-form posts. We use Crazy Egg heat map tracking and are able see where readers are dropping off. This helps us alter the posts to our demographics and psychographics. With this, we’re able to best make use of our ad spend and increase our chances for virality.
Liz Holmquist – QNY Creative
Like anything else, I think this answer depends. Of course, the obvious answer is picking the best audience possible for the ads. However, what works for a lot of my clients, especially the ones that sell directly online, is to boost the Tweets with the best engagement from the past few weeks. This eliminates the component of trial-and-error that you can sometimes have when running a brand new ad.
This strategy also uses what works with your target audience to your advantage. I’ve found that though conversions from Twitter are fewer than audiences on Facebook or Instagram (again, depending on the product) but Twitter customers tend to be very engaged.
Playing to what you know your followers and/or target followers already want to see is very effective. You can also implement this tactic by analyzing your competitor’s Twitter page to steal their followers.
Michael Ramsey – tbk Creative
Twitter advertising has been highly effective for key campaigns tbk Creative has run for our clients.
In our experience, it is important to focus Twitter advertising efforts on a simple offer that will quickly pull users in. The most successful campaigns we have run have focused on high funnel engagement such as contest promotions.
With very direct messaging that is built around Twitter’s demographic targeting options we saw good click-through-rates (>1%), reasonable cost-per-click (~$1.50), and excellent conversion rates (~65%).
These stats yielded the cheapest cost-per-conversion for these campaigns out of any of the social channels we leveraged.
Andrew Chwalik
Building traffic for your website is high priority, especially when it’s your best method for turning leads into paying customers. One fantastic way to draw people to your site is through Twitter Ads. I’ve been using Twitter ads for over a year now so let me fill you in on my strategy.
First, you need to know that there are three types of “ad styles” that you can implement, those are Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends.
I prefer to use the Promoted Tweet style because it allows you to share a specific message, which enables you to better direct people to your website. When setting up your campaign, which is extremely simple, make sure to be clear, concise, and descriptive. I’ve found that short video clips and customized cards draw more users to your site when targeting ultra-spscific audiences.
However, the best thing you can do is test your strategy with organic tweets before making any purchases. Twitter provides some stellar analytics so try out a few different posts and then implement the best style in your advertising campaign. Good luck and happy tweeting!
Helena – Local Fame
Twitter Ads can be a powerful source for driving relevant traffic to your website but you have to know some tricks if you want to succeed. There are a few aspects that you have to pay attention:
- Ad copy — high-quality visuals are a MUST (GIFs, contrasting colors and engaging messages instead of a straightforward sale)
2. Twitter ads are great for limited-time offers (corresponds with the short lifetime of a typical tweet) and emphasize on the urgency related to the offer.
- Always A/B test different ads so that you know which one is more appealing to the audience.
(test different images/audience/copy)
- Use Tailored Audiences to reach existing customers and the ones that have already visited your website and thus show them the currently promoted offer.
- Website Cards are a great way to drive traffic to your website if you structure them properly
- Take advantage of Advanced targeting features
Nate Shivar – Shivar Web
Use Twitter Tailored Audiences to reach people who are already familiar with your brand.
Twitter is a tough platform because there is so much noise. Everyone’s feeds are too crowded. But Twitter Ads allow you to basically pay to stand out above the noisy feeds. The trouble that I’ve had is finding truly targeted audiences.
Twitter is so ephemeral and news-driven that it’s hard to zero in on people’s interests — like you can on Facebook or Pinterest. However, given the fact that people like what they already know, you do have a big opportunity to reach your existing audience when they are looking for something to browse.
When you have a piece of content or an announcement to make, use your Tailored Audiences to reach people who are already pre-disposed to like your brand (since they have been to your site), but might otherwise not hear about your products / services. As long as your tweets are not salesy or promotional, they’ll also feel organic and get solid engagement.
Spencer X Smith
Use compelling copy, including a relevant hashtag, to a mobile-friendly landing page that requests an email address in exchange for a digital asset.
Before spending ad money, publish the post organically to see if you get any clicks/conversions first, and iterate on the tweet and the landing page based on those results.
On the landing page, ask for an email in several locations (via lightbox or brief form) to make navigation simple.
Also, ensure you’re using remarketing technology from Twitter (as well as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc.) to retarget those who don’t convert during the initial visit.
Elena Petrova – Mobidea
Objective: Website clicks or conversions
One of the best things about Twitter is the ability you get to make sure your advertising strategy is aligned with a real targeted audience.
When it comes to targeting and depending on my campaign goals, I usually like playing with the following new features: keywords, followers, interests, and tailored audiences.
The best strategy we’ve used so far was to actually target specific keywords, narrowing the targeting down to the followers of particular Twitter profiles.
In addition, we showcase a clear and direct advertising message and no hashtags.
The result?
A high CTR — higher than 3% — with a pretty low cost per link — €0.04.
Sarah Johnson – Fit Small Business
My best strategy is a three step process.
First, you need to create a great piece of shareable content. This can either be an informative infographic, or a data-driven article, but should definitely be related to your product or service.
After you have the content posted on your site, you will want to search for journalists, bloggers, and influencers in your field.
One way to do this is to use a PR tool such a Cision, which has filters so you can find people who write about the topic related to your company.
For example, if you own a gym, you can find people that write about fitness, nutrition, etc.
Cision also has each of the Twitter handles for most journalists in their system.
Finally, once you have the list of Twitter handles of journalists in your field, you can use Twitter’s ad dashboard to promote your shareable piece of content to only these specific influencers.
The goal: people who see your story will retweet it to their followers, or think it’s interesting and write about it for their own publication, which most likely gets more eyes than your website’s blog.
This will lead to more traffic to your site, plus you’ll get SEO value from high quality journalists writing about your content and therefore linking back to your site
Ninja Master – Blog Ninja
Twitter and Facebook advertising are great for remarketing. More people are doing this on Facebook than they are with Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be trying it on your own and see how it works for your brand.
Something that has worked extremely well for us is getting site visitors onto our mailing list and autoresponder series. We can then create a segmented ad campaign on Twitter to show ad placements based on the most recent mailings that were read.
This is done by placing different pixels on your email landing pages and then showing ads on Twitter to get the user to hopefully take action when they come back to your site.
The cool thing is you can get quite creative with this process and also scale the remarketing to work across various platforms.
Ben Darche – Brand Networks
The best way for advertisers to use Twitter to drive traffic is to implement a social tool with an API plugin to Twitter’s Ads Manager.
Tools like those from Brand Networks or other companies in the space allow precise targeting by demo or interest group and those with what I’d call “AI-lite” learning algorithms will continually refine and optimize ads and targeting to drive your best performance, whether for traffic or awareness.
Cale Loken – 301 Madison Consulting
My strategy for conducting an ad campaign for a client on Twitter is as follows. I use a site called WhatRunsWhere.com and I will input the client’s biggest competitor. WhatRunsWhere will tell me where the competitor is advertising most.
I will determine where most of the traffic is coming from based on where they are advertising. Some businesses are advertising on hundreds or thousands of different websites. I take the top 10, then I locate the Twitter accounts for these sites.
When I set up my Clients ad, I will target the followers of these accounts and “expand my reach” to reach even more of that specific audience. This is the process I go through for each and every client advertising on Twitter.
Justin Moodley – LASANAN
Our agency has always found that by amplifying the natural discourse we’re already having through Twitter (on behalf of our brands), we’re able to create visibility that doesn’t feel exclusively like a sales pitch.
We accomplish this by identifying the content that organically creates the most positive reactions and engagements, then boosting that content out to a larger audience that extends past profile followers.
Often times there isn’t a clear call to action, but the content works as a great introduction that allows quality prospects to dive deeper into the brand and engage on their own terms.
Matt Edstrom – BioClarity
When trying to pull in additional traffic to your site using Twitter ads, utilizing website conversion campaigns has proven to be the best strategy.
Although you are charged per click just like when you use a generic click campaign, conversion campaigns contain additional functionality to track conversions. Similar to click campaigns, conversion campaigns also allow you to utilize website cards.
However, with the additional tracking functionality, you are able to better AB test different ad and website cards. An AB test strategy to consider is to have one website card (Test A) that builds curiosity.
For example, your headline could begin with, “Did You Know…” or “Find Out How…”. Then have the other website card (Test B) state exactly what they will get from clicking and going to your site. For Example, “8 Workouts to Keep You Slim Through the Holidays” or “3 Gifts Your Mom Will Love”.
After running these tests, you will have a clear view of what kind of ads your target audience prefers, allowing you to deliberately shift your efforts toward one style or the other, rather than just guessing.
Ultimately making your Twitter ad campaigns much more strategic and successful.
Andrei Vasilescu- Don’t Pay Full
Social media is the most important medium of modern marketing concept through which the largest number of organic visitors are generated to the business websites. A very good quantity of website traffic comes from the Twitter profiles of the companies. The following are some useful strategies to use Twitter for getting more organic traffic to your business website.
Identify audience: First you have to select the community where you want to promote your business to possibly get the maximum conversion. Twitting abruptly to everyone will not bring any good result. You gather adequate knowledge of what you want to promote and target those people who might be interested in your business. Then twit your content which will make them interested to visit your website for more information.
Optimize profile: People will not be interested in what you have to say if your twitter profile is not an attractive one. Use nothing but your own image for the profile image. A good cover photo related to your niche will help to introduce yourself to your followers. Give a precise and crisp bio which will tell about your expertise and your business. Thus a good Twitter profile will help to bring more traffic to your business website.
Catchy headline: A very good and attractive headline is the first thing to make people inquisitive to go through your content. Your twit headlines must have the hint of possible answers of certain common queries or something unusual or something which is unheard of. Whatever your content is, the headline must be interesting enough to tap into natural inquisitiveness of your audience to hit your business website.
Quality posting: After anything, your twits must be interesting, informative and appealing. Use good quality and relevant visual images which can attract your followers. Use one or two hashtags in your twit to get better exposure to larger expansion. Include clear and strong CTA or Call-To-Action to enhance engagement to your twits. All these simple basic things will encourage your followers to visit your website.
Right timing: Twit at right time is a very important thing to increase engagement and driving traffic to your business website. Twitting multiple times each day gets more attraction of the audience and silently insists them to visit the business website for at least once. You have to know the effective times of twitting your content when your audience is likely to give most attention and you will get more engagement to your website.
Create conversations: Interesting contents about your niche trade or subject will lure the people of the same niche to post comments or share your contents. Making your content a bit controversial or provocative will bring your audience into conversations and people will be more interested to get more detailed knowledge of your business. Hence, more people will hit your website and you will get a good amount of organic visitors.
There are some more different ways to use Twitter to drive traffic to websites, but the above-said ones are the most basic important things to remind when you use Twitter for your business promotion.
Tosin Yussuf – Marketbl
Our strategy is to not approach twitter ads as ads. Treat them like a regular post. There is a tendency when creating ads to forget all the usual rules in order to sell sell sell. This doesn’t work that well on Twitter, make your twitter ad look like a good engaging post for starters.
Always have some additional visual content; this could be a video, an infographic or even a relevant Gif to help it stand out and make it more engageable.
Most of all, offer value, tell your followers what they gain by clicking the linking. You’re asking people to do something for you, give them a reason by telling them what they will get out of it.
This is the key part of the strategy, you can filter out irrelevant traffic here and let the right people know this ad is for them.
Thank you so much to all the experts that contributed to this expert roundup! Hope you can use these tips to make a killer Twitter ads strategy that will make wonders for your site.
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