Best Performance on Twitter Ads - DOs and DON’Ts close

Seth Armstrong-Twigg
In
18th December 2013
Best Performance on Twitter Ads - DOs and DON’Ts

Twitter Ads is now available in countries outside of the US. For the first time, small and medium businesses in the UK, Ireland and Canada can promote their accounts or tweets and are only charged when they attract new followers or when users engage with their tweets through a retweet, favourite, reply or a click. With the service still in the early stages of growth, it’s a bit too early to become a complete master but... beginners could do worse than read the following DOs and DON’Ts in order to improve the performance of their Twitter Ads campaign.

DO

  • Experiment with tweets. Create at least 5 tweets in each campaign before testing them out on your audience. It’ll be a case of trial and error at the beginning before you find out what works. Experiment with image and video content in your tweets and then monitor the results in comparison to those without.

  • Test different twitter handles and keywords. Get rid of ones that have an engagement rate below 1%. Bear in mind, an engagement rate above 1% affects cost positively. Good engagement rates for Promoted Tweets are between 1-3% and above. Promoted Accounts are between 0.01-0.03% and above.

  • Monitor your target audience. Watch your feed like a hawk - get to know your users and track their interactions. Search for successful keywords and use the analytics tool to determine which handles are performing best. Add/Remove handles based on performance.

DON’T

  • Post tweets older than one week. Copy should be renewed to keep tweets fresh - especially if they haven’t been successful. Tweet content is key. Follow this formula: question, solution, call to action, link - remember, this only applies to ads and not organic tweets.

  • Use general hashtags. If you include some random hashtag in your tweet and users click-through, you pay for that click and gain nothing. It only makes sense to use a hashtag that you control and hence drives traffic to your business. Use something relevant - your company name or slogan.

  • Be a robot. Communicate with your audience through organic tweets, as is the current trend. React to live conversations in real time and have a sense of humour about it! Be human and reflect the personality of your brand through your online presence.

Most of all, keep at it and don’t get disheartened if your results aren’t instant. The Twitter Ad platform is developing rapidly with new features and updates constantly appearing. Now is the perfect time to get on board!

Have a look below at some of our own examples...


Our Most Successful Tweet

The success of this tweet rests on a few factors. The structure: question, call to action, link, image. Including a picture in your tweet is always successful and this one engages the reader immediately whilst communicating a clear message.


How To Improve A Tweet

Before…

This tweet is quite plain and fails to properly grab attention. There is no attempt to engage the reader with a question or image.

After.

The copy has been rewritten in a way that targets the relevant audience. The image completely revitalises the tweet and demands focus. Most importantly, this tweet now performs seven times better than the old one!