How to Advertising on Twitter and Other

 

How to Advertising on Twitter and Other

Networks

 Making the Platforms Work Together

While Facebook offers the dominant market share and greatest variety of ad

units, the other social platforms have rolled out compelling opportunities you

can’t afford to ignore. If you leverage multiple platforms for their unique

strengths, you can build a comprehensive social media marketing plan that

reaches the widest possible audience, with the fullest spectrum of media types.

You’ll echo and reinforce your message across multiple social networks, and by

dropping remarketing cookies, you’ll extend your reach 360 degrees.

Here’s a snapshot of how the other platforms can round out your Facebook ad

presence and work in concert:

Twitter: If you’re a publisher, blogger, or thought leader, use promoted

tweets, trends, or accounts to help build a “subscriber base.” If you’re a

retailer, amplify your news, campaigns, and offers from other channels with

a timely and efficient promoted newsfeed.

YouTube: With pre-roll ads and featured videos, bring to life the sights and

sounds of active, visual products and services. As a bonus, amass a

remarketing cookie pool of qualified leads, to be shown banner ads across

the Google Display Network.

Google+: The Google+ ad play is not advertising on the social network, but

bringing social proof into your Google AdWords paid search and online

advertising program. It can be powerful.

LinkedIn: Even B2C businesses live in a B2B world much of the time. Ad

targeting on LinkedIn can help you zero in on the vendors, business. 

partners, PR audiences, and other professionals who will be part of your

company’s social media success.

Smaller niche players: In addition to those larger platforms, your paid

media strategy could extend to some of the smaller niche players like Yelp,

StumbleUpon, and TripAdvisor.

Foursquare: If you’re a bricks-and-mortar retailer, Foursquare will be an

important element of your coordinated social media promotional strategy.

The other social networks can drive awareness and engagement, but only

Foursquare can regularly deliver a community of friends into a local

business. Foursquare doesn’t currently offer paid ads, but if you’re a retailer

with a physical presence, don’t overlook the free promotions I covered. 

Let’s look at each of these options in turn to see how they might best fit your

advertising needs.

Twitter

Twitter has been slower and more measured than most big social networks in

rolling out advertising options. In fact, it was third parties who first sprang up

with unauthorized paid-Tweet programs. Eventually, though, Twitter stepped up

with three offerings:

Promoted Tweets

Promoted Trends

Promoted Accounts

Lately, Twitter has announced a flurry of user-interest-targeting enhancements to

these ad units—and slashed the minimum cost per click (CPC) from $0.50 to a

mere penny. It is clear that Twitter intends to be a player in the social media ad

market. I think the site is worthy of consideration to augment your Facebook

media buy.

Promoted Accounts, Tweets, and Trends

With Promoted Accounts, you pay to have your account featured on the left

column or within relevant search results. The extra exposure helps you attract

new followers. Promoted Accounts appear on the left-hand column under the

headline “Who to Follow”—and you may find yourself in pretty good company.

A recent promoted account for Smart Mom (8,000 followers) appeared above. 

Bill Gates (six million followers) and His Holiness the Dalai Lama (four million

followers).

Promoted Accounts are identified by an orange arrow badge and link to the

account profile. They also feature social signals, which will display if the

Promoted Account is followed by any @usernames that you already follow.

The added exposure of Promoted Tweets also helps attract followers. Assuming

you choose your content shrewdly, you can also generate plenty of retweets. But

try not to come right out and ask for it by saying something like “RT if you love

your kids!”

Promoted Trends bring attention to a trending hashtag, the account that

sponsored it, and all the accounts tweeting about it.

Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts are sold auction style on a cost per

engagement (CPE) model. In other words, you pay only when users click,

retweet, comment upon, or favorite your tweet. Promoted Trends, on the other

hand, are the “Boardwalk” and “Park Place” of Twitter real estate, costing

advertisers upward of $100,000 a day.

A fourth option of passing interest to businesses is Enhanced Profile Pages.

While these richer, more professional-looking pages are a nice touch for brand

image, they’re not available to the public and are doled out by Twitter to its big

advertisers. If that’s you, great! Otherwise, you can make do by customizing

your Twitter background and color scheme (see

http://support.twitter.com/articles/15357).

Advertisers using any of the three Twitter promotions types have access to

analytics dashboards that show the key campaign metrics impressions,

retweets, clicks, replies, and follows in real time.

 Twitter advertisers can drill into the demographic makeup and

interests of their audience by using the Followers dashboard. Courtesy of

Twitter.

You can also see how you gained followers over time and drill into your

audience composition by geography, gender, and engagement rate (i.e., what

percentage of your followers have retweeted you). (Speaking of interests, as I’ll

discuss below, Twitter has now released interest-targeting for its ads, which is an

exciting development.)

Twitter promotions tend to engage a smaller audience than similar promotions on

Facebook, in part because the promotion presentations are fairly subtle—

although they are identified as “sponsored” and they sit at the top of the tweet

stream, they don’t otherwise stand out as dramatically different from other.