Why it pays to get in on the conversation

Immediacy, affordability and relevancy are only a few of the reasons Twitter advertising offers wide potential for advertisers. Its active user base is huge (300 million). It offers diverse targeting options. And, most important, tweeting is conversational. Users interact immediately, re-tweet what they like (or dislike), share offers and quickly disseminate information to your benefit.

Finally, Twitter advertising is inexpensive. It provides good tracking and analytics and offers decent targeting options. But it is important to remember that things move fast on Twitter. Old news is no-news on this platform. The relevancy of posts can be very ephemeral.

Your ad options with Twitter Advertising

There are three well-proven ad types that have stood the test of time. They are Promoted Accounts, Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets. Let’s dive straight in to their usage scenarios and benefits.

Promoted Accounts. These are your brand builders. Promoted Accounts help promote your brand or company, in part by letting users know that you are active on Twitter. They can also make your tweets more effective moving forward. Also, they can appear at the top of the “Who to Follow” area when viewed on a desktop. Finally, they appear in line on mobile devices.

Twitter Promoted Account

Furthermore, promoted Accounts can be targeted to specific audiences, based on affinity groups. Or,specific users and those like them (for example followers of @baristabar). Targeting variables include:

• Interests
• Geography
• Gender
• Tailored Audiences
• TV Targeting
• Device Targeting
• Keywords
• Users like your current followers
• Languages
• Users who follow specific influencers

Promoted Trends. These are Twitter’s prime ad real estate. They’re expensive, averaging six figures per day. But they expose you to the widest audience possible as they are seen by millions of users. If you have a product whose promotional phase is top-of-sales-funnel, Promoted Trends are an excellent way to drive mass awareness.

Twitter Promoted Trend

Catching the moment, riding the wave

In Twitter advertising a trend can be anything you want. You create the hashtag. Then, pay to pepper it through other people’s conversations in a specific geographic or demographic target. Make them cool and interesting and people will pick up on them. Pass them around and all of a sudden you’re trending… and viral! Really great Promoted Trends capture the spirit of the moment, der zeitgeist.

True zeitgeist: The Trend people gobbled up

When the lights went off at the 2013 Super Bowl, Oreo had an ace in the hole. Their ad agency’s social marketing team. Literally within 5 minutes these guys conceived and promoted a Twitter trend. It had a cool visual and a simple headline: You can still dunk in the dark.

Oreo’s famous Super Bowl tweet

The Oreo team was monitoring the game looking for any excuse to tweet. Then a faulty electrical relay gave them a perfect opportunity. Half an hour of enforced quiet time shared by millions of people. And the results were tangible. A big spike in sales of Oreos.

Promoted tweets are ideal for engaging audiences beyond your followers.

Promoted Tweets. These are your scouts and infiltrators, sent to engage audiences beyond your followers. Additionally, you can broadcast them to current followers. Promoted tweets enable you to promote offers and include links to optimized landing pages. Typically one-shot promotions, they don’t have much staying power. But the right offers and call to action can make them measurable and monetizable.

Lead Generation Cards: Capturing Your Leads & Audience Interest

Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards make it simple for users to respond to your Promoted Tweets, Trends and Accounts. Here’s how they work:

1. You add Lead Generation Cards to your account
2. When a user hits your Tweet, it expands to show a description of your offer. In addition, a call to action PLUS a pre-filled form featuring their name and email address.
3. The user simply clicks a button to respond to your offer and send the above information to you.

Lead Generation Cards are excellent for promoting things like product clubs. However, if you’re going that route be sure to include a privacy policy. It’s not only best practice; it’s reassuring your user. You can choose between Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Thousand (CPM). Note: The latter can get prohibitively expensive.

A Twitter Lead Generation Card

Analytics

Twitter advertising includes a dashboard providing good information on engagements, engagement rates, likes and link clicks. Some of the questions the Tweet Activity Dashboard can help answer include:

• First, how many impressions do my Tweets receive?
• Which of my Tweets resonates best with my target audience?
• How do my Tweet metrics break out by organic and promoted activity?
• How does my recent performance compare to past results?
• Lastly, do my engagement metrics break down by type?

Again, it’s not super comprehensive. But you can drill down far enough to see who’s interacting with your brand. And, how they’re interacting and what’s hitting their hot buttons.

Always remember that the power to target with pinpoint accuracy is the #1 advantage you enjoy with any social media advertising. Twitter may be conversational in nature – but precision targeting is key to profitable conversations.

Feel free to share this blog, Twitter Advertising – Social Media Advertising Series, Part 4. We only ask that when shared no changes are made, and credits are given to the authors.

John Thyfault

Laurie B. Beasley

The post Twitter Advertising – Social Media Advertising appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

The big difference between social media and other online advertising is sharing. Users’ love of divulging details about their personal and business lives sets it apart from email marketing and traditional display advertising. And leveraging what people share about themselves on social media can be very profitable.

In short, social media advertising helps you find new customers by using users’ own shared information to identify interest. Its tools let you target the right people before they even begin their online search for products or services – giving you advanced options for targeting and conversion tracking, plus the reach offered by social media’s presence on mobile devices.

Three key reasons for making social media part of your advertising strategy:

1. Targeting

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter enable you to target your advertising to potential customers using a remarkable level of demographic and psychographic data. From sign-up processes to users’ interactions on social networks, user-provided data gives you precise coordinates for targeting consumers and businesses.

Target what they do, not just who they are.

Social media is also about a users’ interaction with his or her community. This dynamic allows you to better understand who they are and what their trigger points might be – giving you powerful leverage when it comes to arousing interest in your brand or product.

The perfect application of one-to-one marketing science.

Based on the model of one-to-one peer relationships, social media platforms provide you the ultimate in opt-in advertising. You can target users with goods and services matching the needs and preferences they’ve shared. Even better, your ad campaigns can reflect sensitivity to users’ opt-out choices.

2. Reach

Social media is the most popular online activity and offers the potential to vastly extend the reach of your advertising. Three out of five Web requests go through social media, meaning 60% percent of all web traffic is social media based.

Perfect for the big swing to mobile advertising.

Marketing via smartphones is the single biggest wave in digital media advertising. It’s also a perfect native option, since mobile users check Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn multiple times a day.

Mobile ads claim the lion’s share of time spent on social media.

3. Cost Effectiveness

The targeting and tracking tools available can help you achieve very low Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – the cost of actually obtaining a new customer. This means your pricing in terms of Cost Per Conversion, Cost Per Click and Cost Per Thousand Placement can be much more affordable if a lower CPA is factored into their costs.

Next up, 10 Best Practices. But first there’s one big thing to avoid:

Inappropriate Messaging
If your messaging is off, users will opt out of your ads, lowering your display ranking and hurting future campaigns. Worse, offend one user, and they’ll tell the whole community – killing your campaign and damaging your brand. And be aware that some communities are sensitive to what advertisers know about them. Ads that they feel violate their privacy will a raise red flag with your name on it.

10 Best practices across all platforms.

1. Set Goals and Metrics

First, define your campaign’s goal and then the action you want people to take in support of it. Are you looking for direct sales or leads? Do you want signups for your newsletter, or requests for a free sample? Think it through. Then decide the action most likely to support your goal.

Make use of the guidance provided by social media platforms for optimizing your ads to accomplish specific goals.

Metrics: Decide the level of response required to judge your campaign’s success. For example, if you’re going to tie revenue to workshop attendance, decide the dollar value of each signup and the total number of signups needed to be profitable. Also assign metrics to actions that have no near term monetary value, like website visits. Put a percentage on the boost in website traffic you want.

2. Create Lifetime and Daily Budgets

A Lifetime Budget lets you select an amount to spend over the entire span of a campaign. Once set, you can’t go over budget. If you forget, you can end up in a deep hole very fast as your ads cycle and recycle. A Daily Budget controls your spend per day. You stipulate how much you will spend on a daily basis and your ads will cease showing once you hit your daily budget cap.

3. Do Your Research

Regardless of what seems to be the best platform for your campaign, take the time to explore the relationships between the demographic and psychographic patterns of your audience. Don’t just assume Facebook is better for B2C or LinkedIn for B2B.

Example: If you are advertising shared business plane leases, research shows that people who are interested in private flight also tend to be interested in performance cars. So advertising to Facebook users who are into sports cars may be worth considering – instead of solely focusing on LinkedIn lists.

Always explore the relationships between the demographic and psychographic patterns of your audience. For example, people who are into flying tend also to be high performance car enthusiasts.

4. Be Consistent

Be sure that your social media campaigns align with your other advertising initiatives. Don’t bring up question marks in people’s minds by making your ads inconsistent with what you’re using for paid search, display advertising, billboards, etc.

5. Pop!

Social media advertising is much different from paid search – where people are actively looking for a solution like yours. So do whatever you can to give your ads some bite, some pop.

6. Align Targeting Options to Objectives

A big benefit of social media advertising comes from the wide range of targeting options the platforms can support. But be sure you’re matching your available targeting options with your advertising objectives.

7. Test and Retest

Constantly swap out ad versions showing different treatments of the same content. Use the better-performing versions to keep adding refinements and test them over the course of your campaign. It’s an ongoing cycle where you continually apply the lessons learned.

8. Schedule To Your Advantage

Schedule ads to match users’ schedules. Look at your target audience, what you’re promoting, and determine the times they’re likely to be on social media. Consider week-part targeting, too – that is, running your ads on particular weekdays, over weekends, etc.

9. Automate

Whenever you can, use your platform to automatically make optimization decisions based on ad performance. For instance, in Facebook you can set up a campaign stating a daily budget of $150 and it will automatically bid for you on either an impression or per-click basis to garner as many clicks as possible for your $150.

10. Repeat!

Gather data and set regular meetings to analyze results, go over the metrics, plan changes and decide how to implement them as your campaign moves forward. Repeat over and over to ensure the best bang for your social advertising buck.

John Thyfault

Laurie B. Beasley

The post Social Media Advertising: Driving Response from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.