3 Things To Know Before Running Your Promoted Tweet Campaign

Even though promoted tweets have been around for about four years, it’s only been more recently that smaller businesses and organizations have been taking advantage of the web advertising service. Promoted tweets are an easy and cost-effective way to gain more awareness for a Twitter account or exposure for a specific tweet, and they can help drive traffic to a website page or blog post. If you’re thinking about dipping your toe into the promoted tweets pool, you’re in luck. We’re sharing some valuable tips based our experience running campaigns to help you get started.

Great Content = Great Results

The most important thing you can do for a successful promoted tweet campaign is drive to content that people will find compelling and valuable. The number of engagements – clicks, retweets, follows – your promoted tweet generates directly affects the cost of your campaign (the more engagements you generate, the lower your cost per engagement), so driving to content that people want to favorite or share is key.

Hit Your Targets

Twitter makes it easy to target specific audiences with your promoted tweets. You can segment your audience in various ways based on:

• Keyword

• Interests and followers

• Television

• Tailored audiences/lists

Delivering content that is highly relevant to your target will increase the odds of success for your campaign. While you are building your audiences, take note of the related suggestions that the tool makes in order to increase your reach. The bigger you cast your net, the better for your campaign.

Test Multiple Messages

Create and run multiple messages to figure out which works bet for you. Depending on the topic of your tweet, you might take a number of different approaches around a messaging strategy. Recently we tested the following tweets in a keyword campaign aimed at a Drupal audience:

Implementing a #Drupal site? Here are 11 common mistakes you'll want to avoid. http://t.co/8MVKhZ54j3

Why Oprah doesn’t want you to hack core – and other celebrity warnings about Drupal performance mistakes http://t.co/j7P2csz2oS #Drupal

While we have found that tweets written in the format of or similar to the first example (“X Number of Reasons to Avoid Y”) tend to do very well, in this particular case the second message was the clear winner when it came to engagement. Now, we can use this information to further refine future campaigns as well as our regular twitter feed. Promoted tweets can be a great complement to your other paid advertising campaigns and, when successful, they can be a useful tool for driving followers and website traffic. The cost of entry is currently relatively low, but that may change as advertisers join market, so start your campaigns today and get ahead of the game.