Since I last wrote about Twitter advertising over a year ago, much has changed and my continued experience with the platform has offered me new insights; insights that I can now share with Twitter advertisers for improving and optimizing campaign performance.
Analyze and A/B Test Your Content
The type of content and language you promote on Twitter is important. Since you only have 140 characters to get your message across and your content shared, it’s important to spend time analyzing what works best for your business. Soft sells work best on Twitter, meaning free content, blog posts, white papers, and webinars will get the best engagement metrics, as opposed to demo requests or hard sells to make a purchase online immediately.
Once you have some data in your account, take a look and see which tweets have been most successful as far as engagement metrics go. Put together a list of your most highly engaged tweets and take notice of the types of content they promoted. Did webinars generate the most new followers? Did blog posts generate the most clicks? Did white papers generate the most downloads? Then run some A/B tests: test new language with the same content and vice versa.
Budget Wisely
The way Twitter funding is set up, you will be able to allocate different budgets on a campaign level. Ensuring that your campaigns with the highest engagement rates have budget to spend is important to keeping up the success of your account. Budget should be reviewed on a campaign-by-campaign basis and updated regularly to ensure that your budget is being spent where the engagement is highest. Adjust campaigns with low engagement to have lower budgets.
If your budget runs out for one of your higher-performing campaigns while a low-performing campaign runs under budget, the money will not be automatically borrowed to cover engagement on the high-performing campaign. When the budget runs out, your campaign will expire and your tweets or promoted account will stop being promoted within that campaign, leading to lost engagement and a loss of leads. This leads into my next point: pay close attention to your campaigns on a regular basis.
Monitor and Update Campaign Information Often
Ensuring that your campaigns have not exhausted their budget is the first reason to check them daily. You want to stay on top of the campaigns that are spending a lot of budget, figure out if the engagement is worth the budget being spent, and adjust accordingly. The second reason is the importance of updating your collateral on a regular basis. If users keep seeing the same promoted tweets they may become exhausted by your brand, and Twitter will cap the number of times a single user can see the same promoted tweet. This does your campaign a disservice in a couple of ways: one, by tiring users of your brand, and two, by eliminating your own impression share.
Prepare a Mobile Strategy
I discussed this in my last post and I will discuss it again here. Now, up to 70% of Twitter’s daily activity comes from mobile devices. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, or you don’t have landing pages optimized for mobile devices, you’re missing out on the majority of Twitter’s daily traffic. If you are optimized for mobile, one tip that is often overlooked is the importance of tracking calls from Twitter advertising (and other social platforms). Since so many users are searching on mobile devices, when they come across your brand and want more information right away, the easiest way to get in touch is to call you rather than filling out a tiny web form on their small screen. Your social media is probably generating phone calls. but if you aren’t tracking them, how would you know? Learn more about tracking phone leads from social media in this white paper: B2B Lead Generation for Social Media: Tips for Generating and Tracking Phone Leads.
There are ways to achieve success with Twitter ads without mobile optimization, but it’s important to pay close attention to the settings within each campaign. A newer feature in the advertising platform lets advertisers turn on mobile for tablet devices with full browsers specifically, without turning on smartphones. This works for businesses with websites that work well on tablets, but maybe not on smartphone devices, and helps achieve a presence on mobile without a full website redesign.
As Twitter advertising continues to change, new best practices and optimization strategies will surface. With Twitter’s recent introduction of Tailored Audiences (Twitter’s retargeting tool) there will be new ways to reach an audience that has already viewed your profile or engaged with your brand previously. What strategies have you found to be successful on the Twitter advertising platform? Leave your tips in the comment section below.