Twitter has “promoted tweets”, which are a parallel to Facebook’s boosting feature. You can target audiences, set a budget, and amplify the same.
Here’s what we know:
Relevance, called “resonance”, will be measured based on interactions such as favorites, clicks on embedded links, or retweets. A low resonance score results in the end of a promotion.
Note that the techniques for timing, budgeting, and experimenting used for Facebook ads are ubiquitous guidelines in the realm of boosting, and should be applied across various social networks.
To avoid restating much of what was already covered on Facebook, we’ll go over what’s different about boosting on Twitter and LinkedIn.
There are standard targeting options (gender, age, location), but there are also Twitter-specific options, like keyword and follower-based targeting.
Notice that there’s a red box around “Add interests” above. Twitter’s data bank of interests is extremely broad in comparison to Facebook’s.
See here:
Compare Twitter’s limited options for interests in “Movies and television” (genres) against Facebook’s, which allows us to nail an interest all the way down to music from the motion picture Inception (much more narrow targeting). This is just one of many examples.
As far as micro-targeting users by interests, Twitter lacks scope. Budgets will get burned quickly on these kinds of audiences. Twitter will place your promoted post in front of some people who find the content relevant, but also in front of a lot of people who just don’t care for it.
This drives CPE through the roof and tanks engagement rates on content since it’s not creating interest for general audiences. Twitter hasn’t developed the specificity needed for interest targeting to be worth using yet.
Keyword targeting has interesting implications. It’s actually similar to PPC in the sense that you can promote your post to pop up first in the search results, like how Google Ads users bid for higher positions on SERPs.
How many of us are spending time in the Twitter search bar?
The action is in the news feed. That’s why Twitter is excited about keywords.
There’s a world of possibility that opens up when you can target based on who is tweeting about or engaging with tweets that contain your keyword.
For example, Breyer’s ice cream could use keywords and location to target people tweeting about ice cream, how hot it is in Tempe, AZ, and even include specific flavors, running ads promoting coupons for the latest flavor at a specific store in that city.
Supplementing keywords by targeting other users’ followers is the easiest way to incept an audience that doesn’t know you on Twitter. It’s also an excellent way to elevate your personal brand and grow your community using help from influencers in your niche.
Quote authoritative figures in your content. They’ll be flattered, and your content will be more likely to “grab” their audience. There’s the added benefit of them possibly sharing what you wrote, which you should promote, too.
Targeting followers + keywords is where the power is:
You can drive engagement and traffic to your profile by riding the coattails of influencers. Look at their followers as buckets of users with overlapping interests that you can select from by including keywords to further narrow the audience.
With the right plumbing in place, you could drive engagements down to conversions through promotion and track as well.
We have an example here of a tweet from the Golden State Warriors promoting Steph Curry “back-to-back MVP” merchandise.
In the midst of all of the NBA Finals hype, we were getting a ton of impressions, but let’s take a closer look.
The audience included followers of the Golden State Warriors, FOF, and followers of team members. This was supplemented by keyword targeting, reaching folks who were searching for or using #warriors, #dubnation, and #NBAPlayoffs in tweets.
These combined targeting elements yielded a $0.06 CPC, which is in the same realm of metrics that has had us boasting about Facebook ads for so long.
That being said, this is an ad pulled from the Dubs account during the NBA playoffs, which is context that’s hard to rival. I want to make the point that Twitter ads aren’t for everyone... at least not yet.
For now, it’s worth testing; and don’t worry if you don’t have a $15,000 budget to drop. All it takes is a dollar a day against an influential piece of content to incept audiences who will do the legwork for you.
We tried boosting some of our own content and found that you can post evergreen on Twitter as well. The highest performing post has 802 likes, 217 retweets, and 11 replies with nearly 200,000 impressions-- all of this for a CPC of $0.14 right now (none of our boosted posts have a CPE over $0.03 by the way).
This tweet is pinned to the top of my Twitter feed. Do you see how this generates immediate authority? Do this on Facebook too.
