10 Best Twitter Advertising Practices

Twitter is a place where people go to discover what’s new and engage in conversations which makes it a rich platform for brands to connect with their active audience. Twitter’s wide range of advertising products helps businesses achieve their marketing goals, whether it’s about raising awareness or driving website traffic, or somewhere in-between.

We talked to account managers and ad experts to understand the ultimate best practices for advertising on Twitter. We have listed the best strategies so you can compete with other brands on Twitter.

Use the Right Hashtags

Using hashtags ensures maximum exposure for your tweets, which is critical on a platform like Twitter, where the volume of tweets is extremely high. Anyone looking for a particular topic can find relevant tweets and conversations by merely searching hashtags. Tweets with hashtags get more engagement, so don’t skip over learning how and what to use to bolster your efforts, you can use hashtags for topics, events, places, industry terms, or popular themes. Try a mix of popular, trending hashtags and ones that are uniquely yours so people can find your content. A few hashtag generators you could try out: #Hashtagify, #Tagsfinder, #HashtagsForLikes, #All-Hashtag.

Multiple Tweets and Vary your Creative

Having one super strong video ad is great, but it’s not the best course of action for successful campaigns. As they say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The best approach is having multiple Tweets in a single campaign and varying the creativity. This means you can run a Video Ad, a Video Ad with a Website Button, a Tweet with an image, and a plain-text Tweet.

Convey a Sense of Urgency

Twitter moves in real-time, and your Tweets should too. Give people a reason to take immediate action and visit your site, download your app, or follow you. Do you have a limited-time offer or sale you’re promoting? Are you offering a discount to the first 20 people who reply to your Tweet or sign up for your newsletter? Should people follow you to stay up to date with the latest, breaking industry news? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you must follow this practice.

Incorporate Strong Visuals

Creatives are one of the most important elements to any ad’s success. 97% of people focus on visuals on Twitter, so it’s important that yours is eye-catching and features your product or key message. And whether you’re using an image, GIF, or video, make sure that there’s a clear connection between your visuals and your Tweet copy.  You can combine beautiful images with a bit of informative text. Or use text to ask a question, share a quote or help get your point across. This is a tactic used by TripAdvisor on a frequent basis as shown above. They ask a question and then share a relatable image and quote to boost engagement.

Explore Different Targeting Options to Find your Audience

Twitter is home to hundreds of niche audiences and fan groups. Especially if you’re just starting out on the platform, we know it can be difficult to find your loyal customer base. For early campaigns, try to keep your targeting broad. After a couple of weeks of initial learnings, you can see which audience groups your content is resonating most with and continue building off of that. Use Tweet Engager targeting to remarket to groups who’ve engaged with your past content. If your campaign ties into a larger conversation (i.e. connecting with an upcoming holiday or current trend), try using Twitter’s unique conversation targeting to reach people who are active in those conversations.

Promote Your Best Tweets

Promoting tweets allows you to pay to display your content to people who aren’t yet following you on Twitter. People can interact with them like a regular tweet, but they’ll be marked “promoted.” Which tweets should you promote? The ones with the best content, and ones with a photo or video as they get more engagement and retweets. You should also promote tweets with links in them as they should drive more people to your website, downloadable content, or most recent blog post. Make sure a new viewer can understand what you’re all about from your promoted tweet. They may not see any others, so give them everything they need to know what you’re about at once.

Use Images and Videos in Your Twitter Ads

Adding images to your Twitter advertising can boost engagement. Additionally, Twitter users post images 361 percent more than videos but save videos to their favorites 49 percent more. Visuals can help explain your campaign and increase the chances that people will notice it and get the message within the short amount of time you hold their attention.

Share User-Generated Content

Any content created by users and followers instead of brands can include text, photos, or videos. Voluntarily created and shared by your fans, it creates connections and draws attention from other users who want to be included. Sharing what real people think of your product or service through customer testimonials and product reviews can add a valuable human element to your ads. How can you tap into this powerful source of credibility? Get your followers involved by asking them to create content based on their experiences with you. They may start looking for ways to engage with your brand or be chosen when you feature your followers’ work.

Host a Twitter Chat on Twitter Topics With the Most Engagement

A Twitter chat is a virtual gathering or discussion that takes place on Twitter at a specific time. They can be a one-time event or a recurring meeting. Usually, a Twitter chat will focus on one main topic, attracting like-minded users to tweet with one another using a hashtag. Whoever is hosting a Twitter chat guides the conversation, asks questions, and encourages participants to engage. Try to choose topics where interest is spiking, but no one has to lead the conversation. If you can offer valuable content and no other brands are engaging directly with fans about a subject, you may see significant results with little time or expense. Tell everyone the chat and its time, topic, and other details in a promoted tweet. Moreover, you can write a blog post and publish it on your site, including a link to the post in your promoted tweet.

Leverage Twitter Trends

Understand what brings people to Twitter, such as critical events. If a massive volume of people will be on Twitter because of something happening in sports or entertainment, jump in with relevant content. Events and conferences, whether live or virtual, are often great ways to connect with like-minded people. Look for hashtags about local, timely, relevant events and happenings and use them to increase exposure. This could mean holidays, game days, and TV events like the Grammys or Oscars. If you have a local business, capitalize on nearby events.

Conclusion

Twitter advertising offers many ways to target your ideal audience and connect with them in real-time. Appropriately used, paid Twitter advertising costs can be very reasonable and can help you grow your business. Hence, you can use the above-mentioned practices to up your advertising game on Twitter. We hope this article was helpful, stay tuned for more!