How to create a Twitter advertisement
How to create a Twitter advertisement
Advertising on Twitter is a great way to target potential customers and deliver your key messages about your business directly to your target market. It is important that your advertising speaks to your target market’s specific needs.
Well shaped advertising messages on social media platforms like Twitter allow you to strengthen your brand and reputation.
Here’s how you set up your advertising account and launch your first Twitter campaign.
- Come up with a Twitter handle for your business
A Twitter handle is the name that you use to publish your tweets. It starts with an @ symbol. It is important to keep your Twitter handle as close to your business name as possible. So if your company name is ABC Business, consider using the Twitter handle @ABCBusiness. You want your company name to be instantly recognisable.
- Create your advertising account
To create your account, visit ads.twitter.com. Once there, Twitter will ask you to select your country and time zone. Once you choose this you can’t change it, so make sure that you select the right options because this will affect your billing information, taxes and advertising objectives.
- Select your campaign objectives
When selecting your campaign objectives you’ll be faced with the following options:
- Tweet engagements – This includes retweets (when someone shares your tweet), favourites and replies that will help you to reach more people and drive important conversations
- Website clicks or conversions – This will drive traffic to your website to generate signups and sales.
- App Installs or app re-engagements – This will encourage people to install or re-engage with your mobile applications.
- Video views – This is a great way to create improved engagement and get people to watch your videos using Twitter’s video player.
- Followers – This option exists simply to grow the amount of people following you on Twitter.
- Leads on Twitter – This will help you to collect email addresses from people who express interest in your offer.
When you click on one of these options, Twitter will present you with a preview of what you can expect from your advertising that looks like this…
Four steps to get your Twitter campaign off the ground
Step 1: Set up your campaign
The first thing you need to do here is name your advertising campaign and select the length of time you want to run your campaign for. Select the option to “Set start and end dates” this will help you control the length of time your ads are active.
Step 2: Select your audience
Twitter allows you to pinpoint your exact target market. It starts with you selecting your location, gender, languages and social media platforms but it also gives you a “RECOMMENDED RANGE” which helps you select all the parameters you need to build your ideal audience.
You can narrow your target audience by selecting devices including phones, desktop computers, laptops, mobile platforms and mobile phones carriers like Telkom, Vodacom, MTN or Cell C. On top of that you can select additional audience features, add keyword targeting and customise where your promoted tweets will appear.
Step 3: Set your budget
With Twitter, you have the option of setting a daily budget and a total budget. The size of your budget will dictate the amount of airtime your adverts get.
With the daily budget you can set a maximum amount that you’re willing to spend each day. When you set a total budget, the campaign will keep running until the maximum amount has been reached.
Step 4: Upload your creative material
When uploading your creative material, make sure that it fits to Twitter’s requirements. Image formats are limited to JPG and PNG files with a maximum file size limit of 3MB. The image sizes must fit 600 x 355 pixels – The recommended size is 1,200 x 628 pixels.
Once your images are uploaded, you also need to pay attention to the character limitation. You only have 116 characters to get your advertising message across to your target audience. That means you need to choose your words carefully and use all the right hashtags (trackable keywords followed by #).
Once you’re done setting up your adverts, look to the right hand side of the screen and click the launch button. Your Twitter ad will be live and running.
Analyse your advertisements for the best results
Twitter offers a great analytics tool that can help you to quickly gauge the success of each of your campaigns. If you use it correctly, you’ll get a better understanding of what your audience reacts to and how to get the best results from your campaigns.
Twitter’s tracking tools give you all the statistics you need
Account home provides you with high-level statistics that you can track every month. It shows you your best performing Tweets that get the most activity and responses should drive the theme for your next advertising campaign. If your free Tweets generate likes and shares, chances are, it will probably work better as a paid advertisement.
Use Twitter’s “Campaign Dashboard” to monitor three important results:
- Your impressions – This will show you how many times your adverts have been seen by Twitter users.
- Your engagement rate – This is the number of impressions your adverts received divided by the number of actual results
- Your cost per result – Now you can see exactly how much you’re paying on average for every specific action people are taking on your adverts.
Now that you know exactly what it takes to launch your first Twitter campaign, take the next step. Set up your account, launch your first ad and monitor your results.