3 “musts” to consider for your next Promoted Tweet campaign
By: Chloe Rolph
July 17, 2014 | Reading Time: 2 mins
As a seasoned Facebook Ads vet, I was intrigued but skeptical when Twitter first launched their own self-service advertising platform. I foresaw a couple of potential issues:
- Twitter was already noisy enough given its “raw” feed—as opposed to Facebook which uses an algorithm to handpick which content you are most likely to want to see.
- I also didn’t think Twitter collected nearly enough information about users to be able to target ads effectively—whereas Facebook essentially collects your entire life story so there are tons of targeting parameters there.
With a few campaigns under my belt now, I can say I see a lot of potential here—as long as you, as the ads manager, know how to hack these issues. A big part of being successful with Twitter ads is trial and error and adjustment, but here are a few things to consider right off the bat:
Audience Size
An ads expert from the Twitter team reached out to me while I was running my first campaign and offered to provide some pointers. As a Twitter ads newb, I eagerly accepted and he let me in on a little-known fact that your audience size should be about 300,000 large in order to garner a solid number of impressions. In my case, I was targeting attendees of a specific conference so that just wasn’t feasible, but it was good to know the number I should always be striving for when building an audience.
Hashtags
Avoid including a hashtag in your ad in two situations:
- You are planning to keyword target your ad based on that hashtag (you’re already paying to be part of that conversation and you’re wasting some of those precious 140 characters)
- If your call to action is in the form of driving website visits, you’re giving people two choices for clicking—that’s one choice too many.
P.S. Speaking of driving website visits, I love the Website Card tool—it works. Diving into it would be an entire blog post in itself so I’ll just direct you to this great overview on Twitter’s advertising blog.
Bidding
Another great tip from the Twitter ads expert (bless his soul) was to always set the bid slightly higher than the suggested bid—even if it’s higher by just a few cents. Apparently, suggested bids are consistent and ad managers are equally consistent at taking their suggestions. So if you think of each impression as an auction, your ad is bidding against someone else’s ad for a spot on someone’s Twitter feed. Bid a bit higher and you’ll win the auctions (Note: You actually don’t end up paying more – CPC is typically less than your bid!).
A lot of these things are seemingly intuitive. But when you’re just learning your way around a newer ad platform, they’re also easy to overlook. Hopefully, you find that these tips help give your next Promoted Tweet campaign a boost! Do you have a Twitter ads hack to add to this list? Let us know!